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re 


JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 


BY  VAN  WYCK  BROOKS 

JOHN    ADDINGTON    SYMONDS 
THE  WINE  OF  THE  PURITANS 

A  Study  of  Present-Day  America 

THE  MALADY  OF  THE  IDEAL 


JOHN    ADDINGTON    SYMONDS 


JOHN  ADDINGTON   SYMONDS 


A  BIOGRAPHICAL  STUDY 


BY 

VAN  WYCK  BROOKS 


NEW  YORK 

MITCHELL  KENNERLEY 

MCMXIV 


Copyright  1914  by 
Mitchell  Kennerley 


Press  of  J.  J.  Little  &  Ives  Company 

East  Twenty-fourth  Street 

New  York 


College 
Library 


623 


TO 
MAXWELL  EVARTS  PERKINS 

AND 

LOUISE  SAUNDERS  PERKINS 

from  their  affectionate  friend 


PREFACE 

"V TINE  TEEN  years  have  now  passed  since 
1.  II  the  death  of  Symonds.  During  that 
period  no  study  of  his  life  and  work  has  ap- 
peared except  the  original  Biography,  com- 
piled from  his  Autobiography,  letters,  and 
diaries,  by  his  friend,  Mr.  Horatio  F.  Brown, 
the  well-known  author  of  Life  on  the  Lagoons 
and  other  works  dealing  with  Venice.  Mean- 
while his  reputation  remains  substantially  un- 
altered in  the  fields  covered  by  his  writings,  and 
he  continues  to  hold  a  special  and  an  honorable 
place  in  late  Victorian  literature.  No  English 
critic  indeed  is  more  universally  known  among 
popular  students  of  culture,  both  in  England 
and  America.  "There  has,  in  our  time,"  wrote 
William  Sharp,  in  the  year  of  Symonds' 
death,  "been  no  mind  more  sensitive  to  beauty, 
and  that  not  only  in  one  or  even  in  two,  but 
in  all  the  arts — in  nature  to  an  exceptional 

vii 


viii  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

degree,  and  in  human  life  and  human  nature 
to  a  degree  still  rarer."  And  Frederic  Har- 
rison, in  an  essay  which  remains  the  most  sat- 
isfactory summing-up  of  the  man,  says  of 
Symonds:  "He  has  a  wider  and  more  erudite 
familiarity  with  the  whole  field  of  modern 
literature  and  art  than  had  either  Ruskin  or 
Matthew  Arnold.  Indeed  we  may  fairly  as- 
sume that  none  of  his  contemporaries  has  been 
so  profoundly  saturated  at  once  with  classi- 
cal poetry,  Italian  and  Elizabethan  literature, 
and  modern  poetry,  English,  French,  and  Ger- 
man. Though  Symonds  had  certainly  not  the 
literary  charm  of  Ruskin,  or  Matthew  Arnold, 
perhaps  of  one  or  two  others  among  his  con- 
temporaries/he had  no  admitted  superior  as 
a  critic  in  learning  or  in  judgment."  J 

But  although  his  writings  are  known  every- 
where and  by  all,  the  man  is  known  very 
slightly.  And  the  man  was,  as  his  friend 
Robert  Louis  Stevenson  said,  "a  far  more  in- 
teresting thing  than  any  of  his  books."  Only 
a  handful  of  his  closest  friends  ever  guessed 
the  peculiar  spiritual  tragedy  which  accom- 
panied the  development  of  a  life  in  so  many 


PREFACE  ix 

ways  outwardly  tragic.  As  it  is  chronicled  in 
his  private  memoranda  it  presents  the  only 
really  close  parallel  to  the  more  familiar  trag- 
edy of  Amiel  which  is  recorded  in  English 
literature.  Psychologically  the  case  of  Sy- 
monds  has  a  unique  interest. 

Aside  from  Mr.  Brown's  work,  the  literary 
material  bearing  directly  on  Symonds  is  curi- 
ously meagre.  The  publications  of  his  daugh- 
ter Mrs.  Vaughn  have  proved  helpful  to  me, 
as  also  the  various  essays,  reviews,  notices,  or 
memorials  by  Frederic  Harrison,  Professor 
Dowden,  Walter  Pater,  William  Sharp,  Mr. 
Hall  Caine,  Churton  Collins,  and  Professor 
Villari.  I  have  also  made  liberal  use  of  the 
Life  and  Letters  of  Jowett,  the  Letters  of 
Robert  Louis  Stevenson,  and  Mr.  Horace 
Traubel's  great  work,  With  Walt  Whitman  in 
Camden.  Dr.  Symonds'  Miscellanies  con- 
tributed to  form  my  view  of  Symonds'  father. 
Aside  from  these  sources,  almost  all  the 
writings  of  Symonds  himself  are  surprisingly 
autobiographical  to  anyone  who  reads  them 
with  some  previous  knowledge  of  the  man. 

Few  readers  of  Symonds  may  realize  the 


x     JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

obligation  they  are  under  to  Mr.  H.  F.  Brown, 
his  literary  executor,  who  has  devoted  years  of 
entirely  disinterested,  patient,  affectionate  la- 
bor, as  biographer  and  as  editor,  to  the  mem- 
ory and  fame  of  his  friend.  I  wish  here  to 
record  my  own  grateful  sense  of  this  indebt- 
edness. 


CONTENTS 


'Page  1 

Birth  of  Symonds  at  Bristol,  5  October,  1840 — His 
grandmother  Sykes — Puritan  ancestry — His  father's 
character — Relation  between  father  and  son — His 
mother — Lonely  childhood — Susceptibility  to  trances — 
Clifton  Hill  House — Early  studies  in  art — The  Greek 
spirit — His  suppressed  character  and  morbid  reserve — * 
At  Harrow  School — Discovers  Plato. 

CHAPTER  II 

OXFORD :     JOWETT 

Page  28 

Symonds  enters  Balliol  College — Jowett's  character — 
Influence  of  Jowett  upon  Symonds — Spiritual  condition 
of  Oxford — First  meeting  with  Jowett — Professor  Con- 
ington — ./Esthetic  studies — Poor  health — Jenny  Lind — • 
Wins  the  Newdigate  Prize — Tours  on  the  Continent — 
His  early  style — 111  effects  of  his  Oxford  training — 
Lewes's  Life  of  Goethe — L' Amour  de  I'Impossible — 
Comparison  of  Symonds  with  Amiel. 

xi 


xii  CONTENTS, 

CHAPTER  III 
YOUTH:  WANDERINGS 

Page  62 

State  of  mind  on  leaving  college — Study  of  Venetian 
painting — Confusion  of  creative  and  critical  faculties — 
Attitude  toward  music — Effects  of  introspection — 
Elected  Fellow  of  Magdalen — Wins  the  Chancellor's 
Prize  with  an  essay  on  the  Renaissance — Breakdown  in 
health — An  idyllic  episode  in  Switzerland — With  T.  H. 
Green — Richard  Congreve  and  Positivism — A  dark  in- 
terval in  London — Henry  Sidgwick — Marriage — The 
question  of  a  vocation — First  reading  of  Whitman — 
Consultation  with  Jowett — Translates  Zeller — Renais- 
sance Studies — Woolner — Speculations  on  Handel — 
Resolution  to  enter  criticism — Attacked  by  tuberculosis 
— Confused  inner  life — Speculative  crisis  at  Cannes — 
Struggle  between  doubt  and  faith — A  final  release. 


CHAPTER  IV 

AT  CLIFTON  :    LITERATURE 

Page  84 

Settlement   at   Clifton — Lectures   at   Clifton   College — 
Effect  on  his  career — Death  of  Dr.   Symonds — Intro- 
duction   to    Dante — Begins   The    Renaissance — Pater's, 
review — Symonds  and  Pater — Symonds  and  Swinburne 

•  •      • 

— Greek  Poets — Symonds's  attitude  toward  scholarship 
— Style — Italian  Sketches — Want  of  sociological  imagi- 


CONTENTS  xiii 

nation — Seeing  without  feeling — The  passion  for  the 
picturesque — The  peril  of  culture — Revises  Mallock's 
New  Republic — A  physical  crisis — Effect  on  his  charac- 
ter— Goes  to  Davos — Convalescence — Many  Moods — 
Symonds  as  a  poet — The  Life  of  Shelley — Symonds  and 
Shelley. 

CHAPTER  V 
DAVOS:  "THE  RENAISSANCE":  "ANIMI  FIGURA" 

Page  121 

Davos  in  1877 — Symonds  and  Davos — The  Buols — 
Settlement  in  Davos — Letter  on  Sanitary  Reform — Am 
Hof — The  Renaissance  in  Italy — Symonds  and  Gibbon 
— Historical  method — Want  of  passivity — Confusion  of 
objective  and  subjective — Nature  of  Symonds's  scholar- 
ship— Mark  Pattison — Scholarship  and  style — Faulty 
proportions  of  The  Renaissance — A  critical  creed — 
Friendship  of  Symonds  and  Stevenson — "Opalstein" — 
Animi  Figura — Attempts  to  conceal  self-revelation — 
The  story  of  Symonds's  inner  life — Wine,  Women,  and 
Song — Its  relation  to  his  other  books — His  theory  of 
translation. 

CHAPTER  VI 
swiss  LIFE:   WHITMAN, 

Page  156 

Isolation — A  modern  Ovid — Swiss  gaiety — Symonds's 
enjoyment  of  peasant  life — His  knowledge  of  Grau- 
biinden — Whitman's  Calamus — Symonds  and  Platonism 
— Symonds  on  Whitman — Friendship  of  Symonds  and 


xiv  CONTENTS 

Whitman — Whitman's  atitude  toward  Symonds — 
Shakspeare's  Predecessors — The  theory  of  the  milieu — 
Churton  Collins  on  Symonds's  style — A  series  of  calami- 
ties— Pessimism  and  happiness — Davos  life — The  cos- 
mic enthusiasm — Henry  Sidgwick's  diary — Loses  heart 
in  literature — His  attitude  toward  poverty — A  philan- 
thropic campaign — His  literary  earnings — A  productive 
year — The  Life  of  Sidney — The  Life  of  Jonson — 
Translation  of  Cellini — Cellini  and  the  Renaissance — 
Significance  of  Cellini — Encouraging  letters  from 
Jowett. 

CHAPTER  VII 
LAST  YEARS:    DEATH 

Page  188 

Carlo  Gozzi — Activities  in  Davos — An  impressive  win- 
ter— Autobiography — Essays  Speculative  and  Sugges- 
tive— Symonds  as  a  thinker — Recklessness  of  Health — 
Self-effectuation — The  Life  of  Michael  Angela — Growth 
of  his  critical  method — Later  relations  with  Jowett — 
Breakdown  in  health — Premonitions  of  death — The 
final  journey — Last  illness  and  death  of  Symonds — 
Burial  in  Rome — Jowett's  epitaph. 

CHAPTER  VIII 

CONCLUSION 

Page  210 

Physiological  basis  of  Symonds's  work — Religion  his 
chief  subject  of  thought— Scepticism  and  stoicism — 


CONTENTS  xv 

Position  on  leaving  college — Goethe  and  scientific  pan- 
theism— Greek  and  Christian  ethics — Three  utterances 
expressing  his  position — Symonds  and  evolution — Possi- 
bility of  a  new  religion — Whitman — Mental  reservation 
from  the  "cosmic  enthusiasm" — Definitions  of  deity — 
Dualism  of  Symonds's  mind — Sentiment  of  the  Alps — 
The  sense  of  "greatness" — Basis  of  Symonds's  criticism 
— Matthew  Arnold — Modernity  of  Symonds's  basic 
principle — The  optimism  of  science — His  fundamental 
defects — Relative  position  among  his  contemporaries. 


JOHN   ADDINGTON   SYMONDS 

CHAPTER  I 

A  BOY   AT   CLIFTON 

JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS  was 
born  at  Bristol  on  the  5th  of  October, 
1840.  The  first  eleven  years  of  his  life  were 
passed  in  a  gloomy  old  house,  facing  a  city 
square,  heavily  respectable  and  associated  to 
the  end  of  his  days  with  nightmare  terrors  and 
a  troop  of  depressing  relations. 

The  general  spirit  of  these  relations  seems 
to  be  summed  up  in  his  grim  old  grandmother 
Sykes,  in  whose  house,  gloomier  even  than  his 
father's,  he  spent  many  a  fearful  night.  Of 
this  lady  and  her  following  we  have  a  fine  por- 
trait in  the  grandson's  Autobiography.  By 
nature  distant  and  aristocratic,  she  had  been 
converted  to  an  evangelical  sect  and  found 
herself,  as  a  person  of  substance  and  quality, 
the  acquiescent  prey  of  a  swarm  of  ill-con- 


2     JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

ditioned  gospellers.  "She  delighted  in  the 
Lamentations  of  Jeremiah,  the  minatory  chap- 
ters of  the  prophets,  and  the  Apocalypse.  In 
a  deep,  sonorous  voice,  starting  with  a  groan 
and  rising  to  a  quaver,  she  used  to  chant  forth 
those  lugubrious  verses,  which  began  or  ended 
with,  'Thus  saith  the  Lord.'  I  remember  hear- 
ing nothing  of  the  Gospel,  or  the  love  of 
Christ  for  the  whole  human  race.  .  .  .  She 
concentrated  her  attention  on  the  message  to 
the  chosen  people,  with  a  tacit  assumption  that 
all  who  lived  outside  the  Plymouth  fold  were 
children  of  wrrath.  .  .  .  Heavy  teas,  like 
those  described  by  Dickens,  were  of  frequent 
occurrence,  after  which  the  Chadband  of  the 
evening  discoursed  at  a  considerable  length. 
Then  followed  prayers,  in  the  course  of  which 
a  particularly  repulsive  pharmaceutical  chem- 
ist from  Broad  Mead  uplifted  his  nasal  voice 
in  petition  to  the  Almighty,  which  too  often, 
alas,  degenerated  into  glorifications  of  the 
Plymouth  sect  at  Bristol,  and  objurgations  on 
the  perversity  of  other  religious  bodies.  My 
grandmother  came  in  for  her  due  share  of 
fulsome  flattery,  under  the  attributes  of  De- 


borah  or  Dorcas.  My  father  was  compared  to 
Naaman,  who  refused  to  bathe  in  Jordan- 
Jordan  being  Bethesda,  or  the  meeting  house 
of  the  Plymouth  Brethren."  Pious  old  ladies 
before  and  since  have  delighted  in  being  thus 
imposed  upon,  and  I  speak  of  this  lady  at 
length  only  because  she  throws  out  in  strong 
relief  that  "dissidence  of  dissent  and  Protest- 
antism of  the  Protestant  religion"  which  en- 
veloped Symonds'  early  childhood.  One  other 
point  in  connection  with  her  is  worthy  of  note, 
— her  passion  for  flowers,  which  no  end  of 
Lamentations  could  interfere  with,  and  which 
appears  to  have  been  a  family  trait. 

The  other  side  of  the  house  indeed  was  more 
enlightened,  and  Symonds  traces  with  some 
care  the  evolution  of  his  father's  family  out  of 
a  like  dissenting  gloom  in  which  for  two 
centuries  they  had  piously  submerged  them- 
selves. There  was  a  tradition  of  gentle-born 
Symondses  in  some  remote  past,  a  Knight  of 
the  Garter  in  Edward  Ill's  time,  and  of  one 
Elizabeth  Symonds,  heiress  of  Pyrton,  who 
became  the  wife  of  John  Hampden.  But 


4     JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

these  vain  memorials  had  been  rudely  scorned 
by  the  intervening  generations. 

Medicine,  meanwhile,  had  become  the  family 
vocation,  in  which  two  of  its  members  came  to 
something  like  eminence  before  the  advent  of 
Symonds'  own  father.  These  were  the  critic's 
great-great-uncle,  Dr.  John  Addington  of 
Bristol,  a  racy  old-fashioned  radical  of  the 
school  of  Hume;  and  his  grandfather,  Dr. 
John  Symonds,  pharmacopula  to  the  Univer- 
sity of  Oxford,  who  in  his  old  age  retired  to 
Clifton  and  taught  the  boy  his  first  Latin. 
"Remaining  a  Dissenter  he  became  in  mature 
life  what  may  best  be  described  as  a  Christian 
Stoic.  He  was  a  good  Latin  scholar,  and 
wrote  voluminous  diaries  and  meditations  in 
the  style  of  Seneca.  ...  A  severe  uncom- 
promising sense  of  duty,  a  grim  incapability 
of  any  transactions  with  the  world,  marked  my 
grandfather  out  as  the  lineal  and  loyal  de- 
scendant of  his  Puritan  ancestors.  These 
moral  qualities  were  transmitted  to  my  father. 
In  my  father  they  became  transfigured  and 
spiritualized.  The  advanced  ground  reached 
by  my  father  was  the  soil  in  which  I  grew  up. 


A  BOY  AT  CLIFTON  5 

These  three  generations  of  men — my  grand- 
father, my  father  and  myself — correspond  to 
the  succession  of  .ZEschylus,  Sophocles,  and 
Euripides,  to  the  transition  from  early  pointed 
Gothic,  through  Decorated,  to  Flamboyant  ar- 
chitecture. Medio  tutissimus  ibis.  The  middle 
term  of  such  series  is  always  superior  to  the 
first,  and  vastly  superior  to  the  third.  How 
immeasurably  superior  my  father  was  to  me — 
as  a  man,  as  a  character,  as  a  social  being,  as  a 
mind — I  feel,  but  I  cannot  express." 

This  very  unhumorous  though  modest  sum- 
mary is  fairly  suggestive,  especially  in  the 
third  term  of  each  series,  for  unquestionably 
Symonds  was  something  of  a  Euripides  as  re- 
gards all  that  may  be  called  Sophoclean,  and 
also  without  doubt  there  was  something  flam- 
boyant about  him.  But  I  am  half  inclined  to 
suggest  a  third  series,  and  to  compare  the  suc- 
cession to  that  of  Seneca,  Marcus  Aurelius, 
and  Saint  Augustine,  the  mundane  moralist, 
the  spiritualized  moralist,  and  the  spiritualist 
who  has  relegated  morals  to  the  social  plane 
and  who  illustrates  the  more  ethereal  tragedy 
of  the  soul.  There  was  nothing  Roman  about 


6     JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

Symonds,  everything  Christian  or  Greek.  The 
stubborn  will,  the  stoical  persistence  which  he 
afterwards  developed  were  devoted  to  the 
cause,  not  of  duty  but  of  self -effectuation, 
and,  although  these  qualities  were  without 
doubt  inherited  from  his  Puritan  forebears, 
their  aim  and  motive  were  not  properly  stoical. 
I  have  said  that  his  father  was,  relatively,  a 
kind  of  Marcus  Aurelius.  Perhaps  I  may  add 
that  the  attitude  of  the  father  toward  the  son 
was  like  what  might  have  been  the  attitude  of 
Marcus  Aurelius  to  Christianity  if  he  had 
seen  it  in  any  more  essential  aspect  than  as  a 
political  menace.  He  was  one  of  those  men 
who  seem  to  be  perfect  except  for  the  lack  of  a 
certain  something — not  exactly  love,  or  ten- 
derness, or  sympathy,  for  Dr.  Symonds  pos- 
sessed all  these — but  that  special  kind  of  en- 
lightenment by  which  one  is  perpetually  "born 
again."  Certainly  Dr.  Symonds  never  could 
have  been  born  again.  He  was  far  too  dig- 
nified, and  too  substantial;  the  place  he  filled 
in  the  world  was  far  too  definite.  Virtue  and 
man  lie  measured  on  classic  lines.  "Tempera- 
ment" was  the  one  thing  that  did  not  exist  for 


A  BOY  AT  CLIFTON  7 

him.  It  is  therefore  the  mark  of  great  no- 
bility either  in  father  or  son,  or  both,  that  the 
son  entertained  toward  the  father  such  an  ex- 
travagant devotion.  Symonds'  later  devotion 
to  Marcus  Aurelius  was  perhaps  a  reminis- 
cence of  this  relation. 

Dr.  Symonds  was  in  all  ways  a  notable  per- 
son; the  most  famous  doctor  of  his  day  in  the 
West  of  England,  an  infinitely  hard-working, 
patient,  careful,  generous  man;  liberal  in  pol- 
itics at  the  expense  of  his  early  professional 
standing  in  conservative  parts ;  one  of  the  first 
to  embrace  Darwinism,  as  he  had  been  one  of 
the  first  to  admire  Shelley.  He  had  removed 
in  1831  from  Oxford,  his  birthplace,  to  Bris- 
tol ;  and  had  become  a  great  figure  in  the  town 
and  college,  intimate  with  Francis  Newman, 
Carlyle's  John  Sterling  and  all  others  of  note 
— a  vastly  acquisitive,  laborious  mind  which 
very  soon  set  itself  to  work,  between  hours,  at 
ethnology  and  Egyptian  antiquities,  military 
science  and  the  history  of  warfare,  the  topo- 
graphy of  Greece,  "the  mathematical  laws  of 
musical  proportion  on  which  he  believed  beauty 
in  all  objects  to  be  based,"  Italian  and  Greek 


8     JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

art,  sculpture,  painting,  engraving,  the  collect- 
ing of  books  and  filling  of  portfolios — beside 
the  most  profound  studies  in  medicine  of  all 
branches,  economics,  public  hygiene,  psychol- 
ogy and  general  science.  He  wrote  also,  and 
rose  each  morning  for  two  hours  of  composi- 
tion before  breakfast.  His  Miscellanies,  pub- 
lished in  the  year  of  his  death,  include  a  num- 
ber of  original  and  translated  poems,  marked, 
as  his  son  says  in  the  Introduction,  "by  cor- 
rectness of  expression,  distinctness  of  idea, 
precision  of  form,  elevation  of  sentiment,  har- 
mony and  serenity  of  intellect."  In  the  eve- 
ning he  would  read  aloud  to  his  children  from 
well-chosen  English  classics,  of  whom,  as  the 
years  passed,  Milton  came  more  and  more  to 
be  his  favorite.  Even  his  holidays  were  a  la- 
borious delight,  undertaken  in  a  spirit  of  al- 
most pious  responsibility.  In  summer  he 
would  often  take  his  family  to  the  Continent, 
where  by  travelling  at  night  the  greatest  pos- 
sible time  was  left  free  for  study  and  sight- 
seeing. "The  habit  of  constant  labor  which  he 
had  acquired  in  thirty  years  of  hard  profes- 
sional work  could  not  be  thrown  off.  The 


A  BOY  AT  CLIFTON  9 

holiday  itself  became  a  source  of  exhaustion; 
nor  was  it  surprising  that  the  summers  in 
which  he  stayed  at  home  proved,  according  to 
his  own  confession,  less  fatiguing  than  those 
in  which  he  took  a  tour."  Mill's  Political 
Economy,  or  some  such  book,  he  carried  in  his 
bag  for  study  on  the  trains,  "while  the  rare 
half-hours  of  idleness  in  wayside  inns  and 
railway  stations  were  often  devoted  to  the 
reading  aloud  of  Milton  or  Tennyson," — an 
admirably  wretched  habit,  by  the  way,  which 
descended  to  his  son.  Becoming  interested  in 
the  principles  of  beauty,  upon  which  he  wrote 
an  essay,  he  "set  himself  to  observe  the  nature 
of  sounds  in  harmony  and  discord,  to  interro- 
gate the  monochord,  to  describe  ellipses,  to 
construct  diagrams,  and  to  calculate  numbers. 
.  .  .  The  bent  of  his  mind  was  classical,  its 
most  prominent  features  were  firmness,  solid- 
ity, and  soundness.  .  .  .  His  taste  was  sound 
and  healthy.  .  .  .  He  disliked  the  style  of 
Dante  because  of  its  repulsiveness  and  want 
of  form."  For  similar  reasons  he  disliked  Bal- 
zac, Victor  Hugo,  and  Goethe.  Raphael  he 
admired,  and  Tennyson's  elegance.  "Form  he 


10   JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

greatly  preferred  to  color.  .  .  .  Owing  to 
this  delicacy  of  taste  he  disliked  emphatic 
writing  and  extravagant  incidents  in  works  of 
fiction."  He  took  no  interest  in  such  memoirs 
as  those  of  Cellini  or  Rousseau,  "because  the 
revelation  of  excessive  or  ill-ordered  passions 
grieved  him."  His  religious  philosophy  too 
was  clear-cut  and  simple,  as  may  be  seen  from 
a  kind  of  credo  taken  from  a  private  letter  of 
his  forty-fifth  year,  which  is  printed  in  his 
Miscellanies:  "God  is  the  centre  of  the  moral 
as  of  the  physical  world.  It  has  pleased  Him 
to  place  our  souls,  like  the  starry  spheres,  in 
orbits  that  are  governed  by  centripetal  and 
centrifugal  forces:  the  former  draw  us  toward 
Him ;  the  latter  propel  us  through  those  scenes 
of  outward  life  where  our  work  and  our  duty 
lie.  Moved  too  centripetally,  we  become 
ascetic  or  fanatical.  Carried  away  too  cen- 
trifugally,  it  is  well  if  we  do  not  fly  off  at  a 
tangent  into  chaos,  or  to  the  devil,  the  lord  of 
that  domain  of  lost  intelligences." 

Nothing  could  be  more  interesting  than  to 
speculate  on  the  relation  between  this  father 
and  the  kind  of  son  he  had,  so  essentially  dif- 


A  BOY  AT  CLIFTON  11 

f erent  yet  with  so  many  elements  in  common. 
Symonds,  all  his  life,  struggled  to  reach  some 
such  equilibrium  as  that  expressed  so  calmly 
and  assuredly  in  his  father's  creed.  And  all 
the  passionate  enthusiasms  of  the  son  lie  there, 
embryonic,  in  the  father's  point  of  view — in 
his  pathetically  mechanical  straining  toward 
poetry  and  art,  his  laborious  grasp  of  modern 
culture,  his  insatiable  curiosity.  There  exist 
those  eminent  qualities  which  by  the  nature  of 
things  the  son  could  not  attain,  accuracy  and 
solidity  of  equipment  in  facts,  pure  taste,  pa- 
tience, calmness,  strength.  One  observes 
again  the  profound  antinomy  in  other  points 
— the  father  classical,  the  son  romantic;  the 
father  a  worshipper  of  form,  the  son  a  wor- 
shipper of  color ;  the  father  in  close  touch  with 
life  and  loving  in  literature  precisely  that 
which  is  remote  from  life,  the  son  living  in 
literature  and  straining  to  find  in  literature 
that  which  is  closest  to  life ;  the  father  instinc- 
tively unfamiliar  with  art,  struggling  by  logic, 
by  hard  work,  by  patient  investigation  for 
what  can  properly  be  grasped  only  by  intui- 
tion; the  son,  as  it  were,  blossoming  as  the  re- 


12    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

suit  of  this  toilsome  preparation  in  the  father 
and  losing  thereby  all  that  calmness  and 
strength  the  father  so  certainly  possessed;  a 
relationship  so  infinitely  pathetic,  and  yet  so 
easily  grasped  by  the  analogy  of  everyday  life 
in  epochs  of  quick  social  transition,  between 
fathers  and  sons  when  fathers  are  close-allied 
to  the  social  order  and  sons  are  children  of  the 
muses. 

The  first  eleven  years  of  Symonds'  life,  I 
have  said,  were  unlovely  enough.  His  mother 
died  when  he  was  four  years  old  and  he  could 
recall  nothing  of  her  but  "a  pale  face,  a  pink 
silk  bonnet,  and  beautiful  yellow  hair,"  the 
morning  of  her  funeral,  and  her  grave.  "My 
father  never  spoke  to  me  much  about  her,"  he 
says,  "and  only  gave  me  a  piece  of  her  hair." 
She  must  have  been  made  of  lighter,  brighter 
clay  than  the  rest,  a  delicate  creature  over- 
strained. Three  of  her  children  died,  and 
Symonds  without  doubt  inherited  from  her  his 
neurotic  temperament.  There  were  three  sis- 
ters left  to  populate  the  nursery,  which  was 
lively  enough  when  the  sun  was  up,  but  filled 
with  terrors  after  dark  bv  the  tales  of  two  dis- 


A  BOY  AT  CLIFTON  13 

mal  old  nurses,  one  of  whom  would  stick  her 
needle  into  the  little  boy's  pillow  to  frighten 
him  into  sleep,  while  the  other,  Mrs.  Leaker, 
was  a  kind  of  gypsy  sibyl  conversant  with 
spells,  phantoms,  and  haunted  castles.  No 
wonder  Symonds  was  early  persuaded  "that 
the  devil  lived  near  the  doormat  in  a  dark  cor- 
ner of  the  passage  .  .  .  that  he  appeared  to 
me  there  under  the  shape  of  a  black  shadow 
scurrying  about  upon  the  ground,  with  the 
faintest  indication  of  a  swiftly  whirling  tail." 
For  a  long  time  he  believed  that  under  his 
bed  lay  a  coffin  with  a  corpse  in  it,  which  was 
always  on  the  point  of  rising  up  and  throwing 
a  sheet  over  him.  He  dreamed  constantly  of  a 
disconnected  finger  that  crept  into  the  room 
crooking  its  joints.  Fancies  of  this  kind  w7ere 
stimulated  by  a  collection  of  German  murder 
tales,  which  greatly  impressed  him,  and  by  a 
series  of  magazine  articles  on  spectral  illu- 
sions. Gastric  fever  had  contributed  to  make 
him  a  nervous  invalid  from  birth ;  weak,  puny, 
morbidly  timid  and  suspicious.  Until  he  was  a 
grown  man  he  believed  he  filled  everyone  with 
repugnance. 


14   JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

Apart  from  these  things,  all  notable  in  their 
effect  on  his  later  life,  two  or  three  facts  and 
incidents  of  his  early  childhood  seem  to  me 
significant.  Very  early  indeed  traits  of  the 
artist  appear.  He  mentions  in  his  Autobiog- 
raphy the  pediment  of  the  front  door  in 
Berkeley  Square.  "I  had  a  particular  affec- 
tion for  this  pediment.  It  had  style."  Flow- 
ers too  he  loved  and  distinguished.  He  took 
long  country  walks  with  his  grandfather,  who 
told  him  the  names  of  plants.  Here  one  traces 
the  beginning  of  that  astonishing  knowledge 
of  botany  of  which  he  makes  such  effective  use 
in  his  writings.  At  the  same  period  he  began 
to  fall  into  a  peculiar  kind  of  trance,  which  he 
describes  thus : 

"It  consisted  in  a  gradual  but  swiftly  pro- 
gressive obliteration  of  space,  time,  sensation, 
and  the  multitudinous  factors  of  experience 
which  seem  to  qualify  what  we  are  pleased  to 
call  ourself .  In  proportion  as  these  conditions 
of  ordinary  consciousness  were  subtracted,  the 
sense  of  an  underlying  or  essential  conscious- 
ness acquired  intensity.  At  last  nothing  re- 
mained but  a  pure,  absolute,  abstract  self. 


A  BOY  AT  CLIFTON  15 

The  universe  became  without  form  and  void  of 
content.  .  .  .  The  apprehension  of  a  coming 
dissolution,  the  grim  conviction  that  this  state 
was  the  last  state  of  conscious  self,  the  sense 
that  I  had  followed  the  last  thread  of  being 
to  the  verge  of  the  abyss,  and  had  arrived  at 
demonstration  of  eternal  Maya  or  illusion, 
stirred  or  seemed  to  stir  me  up  again.  The  re- 
turn to  ordinary  conditions  of  sentient  exist- 
ence began  by  my  first  recovering  the  power  of 
touch,  and  then  by  the  gradual  though  rapid 
influx  of  familiar  impressions  and  diurnal 
interests.  .  .  .  Often  have  I  asked  myself 
with  anguish,  on  waking  from  that  formless 
state  of  denuded,  keenly  sentient  being,  which 
is  the  unreality? — the  trance  of  fiery,  vacant, 
apprehensive,  sceptical  self  from  which  I  issue, 
or  these  surrounding  phenomena  and  habits 
which  veil  that  inner  self  and  build  a  self  of 
flesh-and-blood  conventionality  ?" 

Is  it  possible  that  mystical  experience  of 
this  kind  prevents  us  from  feeling  that  phe- 
nomena have  any  very  serious  finality?  This 
mysticism  in  his  nature  may  have  been  one  of 
the  elements  which  interfered  with  Symonds' 


16   JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

special  integrity  as  scholar  and  historian.  It 
is  enough  to  say  here  that  the  confusion  of 
mundane  and  visionary  values  created  in  him 
a  kind  of  natural  duplicity.  The  distinction 
between  "what  we  call  true  and  what  we  call 
false"  was  learned  by  him  artificially.  One 
day  he  came  home  from  school  telling  how  he 
had  been  set  upon  by  robbers ;  though  the  rob- 
bers were  entirely  real  to  him,  his  father  con- 
vinced him  that  he  must  not  confuse  day- 
dreams with  literal  experience.  Thus  he 
learned  "the  all-importance  of  veracity — the 
duty  and  the  practical  utilitj^  of  standing  on  a 
common  ground  of  fact  with  average  men  and 
women  in  affairs  of  life."  It  may  be  recalled 
that  Shelley  even  after  his  marriage  was  sub- 
ject to  hallucinations  of  precisely  the  same 
kind,  which  have  caused  endless  confusion  to 
his  biographers. 

In  June,  1851,  Dr.  Symonds  moved  his 
family  to  Clifton  Hill  House  at  Clifton,  on 
the  heights  above  Bristol.  Now  for  the  first 
time  Symonds  was  able  to  expand.  The  house 
itself  was  beautiful — a  fine  Georgian  mansion, 
built  by  an  old  merchant  in  the  days  of  Bris- 


A  BOY  AT  CLIFTON  17 

tol's  glory:  an  ancient,  liberal  house,  with  great 
windows  that  looked  over  the  ridge  of  the  hill, 
over  the  city  with  its  wharves  and  ships  and 
church-towers,  over  the  river  Avon  to  the 
hills  and  distant  villages.  A  garden  was 
laid  out  upon  the  slope,  half  wild  again  after 
so  many  years,  planted  'symmetrically  with 
stately  elms  and  copper-beeches,  tulip-trees 
and  cypresses  overgrown  with  climbing  roses. 
"Two  ponds,  quaintly  enclosed  with  wired 
railings,  interrupted  at  proper  intervals  the 
slope  of  soft  green  turf.  Each  had  a  fountain 
in  its  midst,  the  one  shaped  like  a  classic  urn, 
the  other  a  Cupid  seated  on  a  dolphin  and 
blowing  a  conch.  When  the  gardener  made 
the  water  rise  for  us  from  those  fountains,  it 
flashed  in  the  sunlight,  tinkled  on  the  leaves 
and  cups  of  floating  lilies,  and  disturbed  the 
dragon-flies  and  gold  fish  from  their  sleepy 
ways."  The  spacious,  airy,  lofty  rooms, 
flooded  with  light  and  filled  with  fragrance 
from  the  garden,  seemed  a  world  of  poetry  to 
the  boy  after  his  dolorous  years  in  the  city 
square. 

At  Clifton  he  began  to  absorb  the  first  im- 


18    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

pressions  of  Greek  and  Italian  poetry  and  art 
which  became  the  basis  of  his  later  studies; 
turning  over  and  Over  the  contents  of  well- 
assorted  portfolios  and  teaching  himself  to 
draw  in  desultory  fashion  after  designs  of 
Flaxman  and  engravings  from  Raphael.  He 
seems  to  have  been  profoundly  torpid,  slug- 
gish, half-awakened,  still  morbidly  shy  and 
given  over  to  nightmares  and  sleep-walking. 
He  describes  himself  as  utterly  wanting  in  will 
and  application,  impatient  and  visionary.  His 
tutor  was  a  kind  of  routine  classicist,  a  dull 
conscientious  man,  incapable  of  striking  fire  in 
a  boy.  With  him  however  Symonds  began  to 
read  Greek  and  from  this  hour  dates  the 
formation  of  that  Greek  ideal  of  beauty  which 
pursued  him  through  life.  Let  me  give  the 
discovery  in  his  own  words:  "With  Mr. 
Knight  I  read  a  large  part  of  the  Iliad. 
When  we  came  to  the  last  books  I  found  a 
passage  which  made  me  weep  bitterly.  It  was 
the  description  of  Hermes,  going  to  meet 
Priam,  disguised  as  a  mortal  .  .  .  The 
Greek  in  me  awoke  to  that  simple,  and  yet  so 
splendid  vision  of  young  manhood,  'In  the 


A  BOY  AT  CLIFTON  19 

first  budding  of  the  down  on  lip  and  chin, 
when  youth  is  at  her  loveliest.'  The  phrase 
had  all  Greek  sculpture  in  it.  The  overpow- 
ering magic  of  masculine  adolescence  drew 
my  tears  forth.  I  had  none  to  spare  for  Priam 
prostrate  at  the  feet  of  his  son's  murderer; 
none  for  Andromache  bidding  a  last  farewell 
to  Hector  of  the  waving  plumes.  These  per- 
sonages touched  my  heart,  and  thrilled  a  tragic 
chord.  But  the  disguised  Hermes,  in  his  prime 
and  bloom  of  beauty,  unlocked  some  deeper 
fountains  of  eternal  longing  in  my  soul."  A 
passage  in  which  the  man  and  the  artist  stand 
plainly  opposed  already  in  their  perpetual 
dualism.  At  the  same  time  he  discovered  a 
photograph  of  the  famous  Cupid,  the  "Genius 
of  the  Vatican,"  over  which  he  was  wont  to 
brood,  somewhat  to  the  discomfort  of  his  fa- 
ther, who  asked  him  "why  he  did  not  choose 
some  other  statue,  a  nymph  or  Hebe."  This 
passion  for  adolescent  masculine  beauty,  con- 
ceived in  the  true  Greek  spirit,  was  associated 
\vith  trains  of  sympathy  which  first  attracted 
him  to  Michael  Angelo  and  to  Walt  Whitman, 
who  was  greatly  perplexed  by  it,  and  led  also 


to  certain  crass  misunderstandings  that  have 
hardly  yet  disconnected  themselves  from 
Symonds'  name.  It  formed  one  of  the  chief 
strains  in  his  extremely  complex  nature,  quali- 
fied almost  all  his  ideas,  and  made  him  one  of 
the  principals  of  the  obscure  neo-Platonic 
movement  of  the  later  nineteenth  century. 
And  in  this  early  incident  of  Hermes  we  see 
it  illustrating  in  the  boy  a  passion  for  ideal 
beauty  deeper  than  any  passion  he  possessed 
for  sentiment,  for  human  situations,  for  life. 
Symonds  indeed  recognized  at  once  the  valid- 
ity of  the  Greek  spirit  for  us  only  as  it  is 
capable  of  what  he  calls  "democratic"  uses, 
"the  divine  spirit  serving  and  loving  in  plain 
ways  of  pastoral  toil."  And  he  composed 
half-consciously,  in  daily  walks  to  and  from 
his  tutor's  house,  a  kind  of  endless  unwritten 
poem  on  the  theme  of  Apollo  in  exile,  humbly 
tending  the  stables  of  Admetus. 

One  can  easily  see  that  the  subtle  danger 
confronting  Symonds  was  that  of  dilettantism. 
Very  early  his  sensibilities  had  been  stimulated 
far  beyond  any  equally  developed  power  of 
surmounting  them.  He  was  already  alive  to 


A  BOY  AT  CLIFTON  21 

poetry,  to  painting,  sculpture  and  music,  to 
flowers,  to  historic  states  of  mind,  to  nature 
in  many  aspects,  to  color  at  the  expense  of 
form,  and  to  nuance  more  than  color.  Mean- 
while his  character  remained  nebulous,  flaccid, 
irresolute.  This  state  of  affairs  continued  un- 
til he  was  past  thirty,  thanks  to  the  grinding 
mill  of  respectable  education  he  was  put 
through.  "So  far  as  my  father  was  con- 
cerned," he  says,  "I  grew  up  in  an  atmosphere 
of  moral  tension,  and  came  to  regard  work  as 
the  imperative  duty  imposed  on  human  be- 
ings." Yes,  but  what  kind  of  work?  Nothing 
is  more  entirely  certain  than  this  idea  of  work, 
as  a  blind,  wholesale,  mechanical  imposition  of 
conscience  artlessly  harnessed  on  human  na- 
ture, conceived  as  a  sort  of  mass-wind,  to  con- 
firm children  of  strong  individuality  in  habits 
of  essential  idleness.  For  nothing  is  done  to 
harmonize  their  work  with  their  capacities. 
Especially  was  this  true  in  the  case  of  Sy- 
monds,  a  physically  weak,  nervous,  susceptible 
boy,  who  worshipped  assurance  and  force  in 
others,  and  heroized  precisely  those  who  dealt 
most  stupidly  with  him :  a  trait  of  real  nobility 


22    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

in  itself  which  postponed  and  permanently 
warped  his  proper  self-development.  As  we 
shall  see,  he  fell  out  of  the  hands  of  his  father 
only  to  fall  into  the  hands  of  Jowett,  with  like 
results.  Through  all  these  years  his  fancy 
ran  one  course,  undirected,  uneducated,  chaotic, 
helpless,  while  his  outward  life  followed  the 
usual  rut :  and  all  the  powers  that  be  restrained 
him,  levelled  him,  coerced  him,  appealed  to  all 
that  was  dutiful  in  him,  to  produce  one  more 
English  gentleman.  Wanting  in  the  sense  of 
a  distinct  personal  purpose  which  might  have 
controlled  his  private  activities,  he  merely  re- 
treated into  a  dim  world  of  his  own  where  he 
felt  growing  somehow  a  kind  of  defiant  pas- 
sion to  become  something,  to  be  his  own  man, 
illustrious  in  some  fashion;  and  he  describes 
himself  in  a  phrase  whose  aptness  we  shall 
come  to  see,  as  "impenetrably  reserved  in  the 
depth  of  myself,  rhetorically  candid  on  the 
surface."  That  rhetorical  candor,  forced  upon 
him  thus  early  as  the  only  means  of  external- 
izing himself  in  a  social  world  so  essentially 
unreal  to  him,  became  at  last  a  permanent  lit- 
erary habit,  which  destroyed  the  value  of  his 


A  BOY  AT  CLIFTON  23 

writings  from  the  point  of  view  of  enduring 
art.  Before  Symonds  was  fourteen  his  out- 
ward life  and  his  inward  life  had  each  defined 
itself  so  sharply,  with  such  mutual  antagonism, 
as  to  destroy  forever  the  possibility  of  that 
final  coalescence  between  purpose  and  result, 
between  content  and  form,  between  thought 
and  style,  from  which  true  literature,  true  art 
ensues.  He  was  a  ready  writer,  a  clever  pen- 
man, a  charming  personality — but  he  remained 
impenetrably  reserved.  There  was  a  profound 
Symonds  which  never  got  itself  on  paper :  and 
it  may  be  the  shame  of  art  or  the  glory  of 
life  that  Symonds  was  thus  unable  to  attain 
artistic  sincerity  as  distinguished  from  per- 
sonal sincerity.  For  artistic  sincerity  does, 
without  doubt,  consist  precisely  of  getting  the 
real  self  into  art,  of  externalizing  in  forms 
the  profoundest  intuitions  of  the  heart.  Sy- 
monds was  never  an  artist  in  the  proper  sense. 
His  life  was  apart:  and  he  was  an  admirable 
writer.  Outwardly  he  was  that  high-spirited, 
entertaining,  engaging  person  who  was  to 
write  so  many  pleasant  and  valuable  books— 
the  Symonds  his  generation  knew  and  which 


24    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

all  but  his  intimate  friends  supposed  was  the 
whole  Symonds.  But  the  tragedy  underneath 
is  the  modern  story  we  ought  to  do  our  best  to 
unravel. 

His  father  was  too  busy  to  direct  his  growth 
or  to  guess  its  peculiar  nature,  though  he  took 
him  driving  on  his  professional  visits  through 
the  countryside  and  introduced  him  to  the  bril- 
liant circle  of  friends  who  had  been  attracted 
by  his  growing  fame,  his  character  and  tal- 
ents. Symonds  never  ceased  lamenting  his 
morbid  reticence  at  this  period  of  opportuni- 
ties. He  considered  himself  an  Ugly  Duck- 
ling. Constantly  reminding  himself  that  a 
doctor  had  no  social  position,  he  was  persuaded 
that  his  father's  aristocratic  friends  treated 
him  only  with  flattering  condescension. 

In  the  spring  of  1854  he  was  sent  to  school 
at  Harrow,  after  the  machine  tradition,  to  be 
made  a  man  of.  I  hardly  think  it  necessary  to 
dwell  on  this  dark  lustrum  so  logically  inter- 
vening between  his  father's  tutelage  and  that 
of  Jowett.  "The  situation,"  he  says,  "accen- 
tuated that  double  existence  .  .  .  which  was 
becoming  habitual."  He  took  the  discipline 


A  BOY  AT  CLIFTON  25 

patiently  and  grew  stubborner  within.  He 
kept  repeating  to  himself,  "Wait,  wait.  I  will, 
I  shall,  I  must."  He  dreamed  of  Clifton  con- 
tinually. Meanwhile  his  studies  advanced, 
after  his  own  heart  and  out  of  class.  We  find 
him  preparing  his  Greek  by  means  of  an 
Italian  Bible,  wandering  about  the  hills  and 
meadows  in  springtime;  falling  passively  into 
ritualism  without  any  clear  religious  convic- 
tions; detesting  games  of  competition,  yet 
more  of  an  athlete  and  more  of  a  regular  stu- 
dent than  he  chooses  to  admit;  forming  one 
notable  friendship  with  a  kindly,  humble  cler- 
gyman, Mr.  Smith,  with  whom  he  learned 
masses  of  English  poetry ;  writing  poetry  him- 
self, two  hundred  lines  in  two  hours  on  one 
occasion,  and  forming  the  habit  of  that  "fatal 
facility"  which  dogged  him  to  the  end  of  his 
days;  rebelling  against  Butler's  Analogy., 
whose  conclusive  logic,  parroted  by  rule,  ap- 
peared to  him  by  no  means  conclusive  at  all; 
winning  a  medal  for  excellence  in  studies  and 
also  for  two  years  the  headship  of  his  house, 
where  he  exercised  his  cane  in  at  least  one 
righteous  cause.  Yet  on  the  whole  it  was  all  a 


26    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

dismal  mistake  based  on  a  misunderstanding, 
for,  as  he  says,  his  father  had  only  sent  him 
to  Harrow  because  he  had  never  guessed  that 
he  was  "either  emotional  or  passionate." 

Just  before  the  end  of  his  final  term  he  first 
really  discovered  Plato.  The  experience  local- 
izes itself  in  a  certain  moment,  which  I  may  de- 
scribe in  his  own  words.  In  London  one  eve- 
ning, after  the  theatre,  he  had  taken  the  book 
to  bed  with  him.  "It  so  happened  that  I  stum- 
bled on  the  Phcfdrus.  I  read  on  and  on,  till 
I  reached  the  end.  Then  I  began  the  Sym- 
posium, and  the  sun  was  shining  on  the  shrubs 
outside  the  ground-floor  in  which  I  slept  be- 
fore I  shut  the  book  up.  .  .  .  Here  in  the 
Phccdrus  and  the  Symposium  in  the  'myth  of 
the  soul,'  I  discovered  the  revelation  I  had  been 
waiting  for,  the  consecration  of  a  long-cher- 
ished idealism.  It  was  just  as  though  the  voice 
of  my  own  soul  spoke  to  me  through  Plato. 
Harrow  vanished  into  unreality.  I  had 
touched  solid  ground.  Here  was  the  poetry, 
the  philosophy  of  m}r  own  enthusiasm,  ex- 
pressed with  all  the  magic  of  unrivalled  style. 
The  study  of  Plato  proved  decisive  for  my 


27 

future.  Coming  at  the  moment  when  it  did, 
it  delivered  me  to  a  large  extent  from  the  tor- 
pid cynicism  of  my  Harrow  life,  and  con- 
trolled my  thoughts  for  many  years." 

In  the  autumn  of  the  same  year,  1858,  he 
entered  Balliol  College. 


CHAPTER  II 
OXFORD: 


SYMONDS  was  a  born  hero-worshipper, 
and  the  adoration  which  hitherto  had  been 
bestowed  on  his  father  was  now,  for  some 
years,  to  be  bestowed  equally  on  the  Master 
of  Balliol. 

Jowett's  two  outstanding  traits  were  prac- 
ticality and  scepticism,  a  scepticism  always  in 
the  service  of  practicality.  With  an  almost 
unlimited  power  and  prestige,  he  stood  at  the 
crossways  where  so  many  young  men  had  to 
pass  on  their  way  to  maturity  and,  like  a  Soc- 
rates grown  wTorldly-wise,  reasoned  away  their 
vague  dreams  and  overwhelmed  them  with 
feasibilities.  He  was  a  great  doctor  of  the 
mundane,  equipped  with  tonics  and  lotions  for 
all  the  miasmas  of  youth.  Few  indeed  are  the 
poets,  the  dreamers,  the  artists  who  survived 
Jowett's  treatment.  "Poetry  and  that  sort  of 

28 


OXFORD:  JOWETT  29 

nonsense,"  he  would  say:  and  is  reported  to 
have  found  men  of  poetical  temperament  the 
greatest  of  his  difficulties.  He  was  one  of 
those  worldly  men  who  seem  to  be  justified  by 
their  inexorable  sense  of  duty.  "The  only  way 
in  which  a  man  can  really  rise  in  the  world," 
he  said,  "is  by  doing  good  in  it" — a  sentiment 
the  world  will  always  endorse,  the  most  popu- 
lar of  all  sentiments  indeed,  because  by  offer- 
ing to  the  spirit  the  sleeping-potion  of  useful- 
ness it  permits  men  to  be  unspiritual  with  a 
calm  conscience.  To  Jowett,  indeed,  rising  in 
the  world  was  almost  the  sole  and  conclusive 
sign  of  having  done  good  in  the  world;  and 
he  was  as  unmercifully  insistent  that  all  his 
young  men  should  be  successful  as  he  was 
careless  whether  the  best  of  them  should  be, 
in  the  right  sense,  victorious.  So  long  as  there 
have  to  be  wholesale  professions  which  ignore 
personality,  public  works,  public  persons,  men 
like  Jowett  have  their  important  place.  They 
serve  the  majority,  they  reinforce  the  best  ele- 
ments in  that  rough  amalgam  we  call  society. 
It  is  only  in  relation  to  poetry,  to  art,  to  re- 


30    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

ligion,  that  they  seem  to  miss  the.  point  of 
life. 

In  these  relations  Jowett  appears  painfully 
external.  He  was  just  enough  martyr  to  his 
religious  beliefs  to  give  piquant  exception  to 
the  rule  he  illustrated.  As  regards  the  old 
metaphysical  theology,  as  regards  ritualism 
and  dogma,  he  was  one  of  the  brightest  libera- 
tors. But  he  did  not  fight  with  theology  be- 
cause it  was  the  enemy  of  the  soul,  but  be- 
cause it  was  the  enemy  of  society.  Theology 
he  rejected  not  because  it  interferes  with  re- 
ligion, but  with  the  world,  and  he  could  not 
see  that  between  religion  and  the  world  there  is 
any  essential  opposition.  He  rejected  theo- 
logy because  it  seemed  to  him  just  as  fanciful 
as  the  vague  aspirations  of  young  men.  To 
him  reason  was  the  supreme  law  because  rea- 
son is  the  basis  of  the  social  contract,  and  he 
avoided  the  aesthetic  and  the  spiritualistic  be- 
cause in  some  degree  reason  could  not  operate 
in  them.  One  thing  he  retained  stubbornly, 
his  belief  in  a  definite,  personal  God.  With 
him  it  was  a  kind  of  foible  which  did  not  in  the 
least  interfere  with  an  all-corroding  scepti- 


OXFORD:  JOWETT  31 

cism  that  doubted  everything  else  and  above  all 
life.  I  think  it  is  true  that  only  men  who  in 
their  heart  of  hearts  doubt  life  believe  so  em- 
phatically, so  exclusively  in  society  and  its 
usages.  Only  those  who  are  without  faith  in 
anything  else  believe  seriously  in  "the  world." 
And  Jowett  was  such  a  profound  sceptic  that 
he  found  a  very  solid  basis  in  things  temporal. 
He  believed  so  strongly  in  duty,  in  work,  in 
government,  in  rank,  system,  form,  the  fait  ac- 
compli, because  he  did  not  believe  at  all  in  life, 
in  human  nature,  in  the  soul.  "There  was  no 
clinch  in  his  mind,"  said  Goldwin  Smith,  "he 
would  have  doubted  and  kept  other  people 
doubting  forever.  Whatever  was  advanced, 
his  first  impulse  was  always  to  deny."  And  he 
adds,  "I  cannot  help  thinking  that  Jowett 
sought  in  translation  a  mental  refuge."  These 
sentences  will  prove  important  when  we  come 
to  see  his  influence  over  Symonds.  They  show 
us  the  man  placed  as  a  teacher  of  Greek  and 
philosophy  in  constant  touch  with  speculative 
matters,  bringing  to  them  no  emotional  re- 
sponse, no  human  finality,  and  resorting  al- 
ways to  a  solid  compromise,  putting  his  ma- 


32    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

terials  to  practical  employment  without  any 
sense  of  their  ideal  value.  To  Jowett  Plato 
meant  politics,  and  politics  meant  the  Parlia- 
ment of  England.  With  how  much  of  a  ten- 
der, hidden  irony  must  Symonds  have  read 
that  subtle  parody  of  one  of  Jowett's  sermons 
in  Mr.  Mallock's  New  Republic,  a  book  which 
he  himself  was  to  revise  in  proof  before  its 
appearance — that  sermon  in  which  Christ  is 
so  fatuously  reconciled  with  a  world  which 
contains  no  real  sorrow,  no  real  sin,  in  which 
the  eye  of  faith  discerns  "the  beautiful  spec- 
tacle of  good  actually  shining  through  evil 
.  .  .  the  well-being  of  the  rich  through  the 
misery  of  the  poor,  and,  again,  the  honest  in- 
dustry of  the  poor  through  the  idleness  of  the 
rich":  a  sufficiently  cheap  faith  which  pro- 
claims glibly  the  difficult  truth  proclaimed 
with  equal  glibness  by  Pope: 

"All  nature  is  but  art  unknown  to  thee; 
All  chance,  direction  which  tliou  canst  not  see; 
All  discord,  harmony  not  understood; 
All  partial  evil,  universal  good." 

I   am  speaking  of  Jowett   from  a   rather 
celestial  point  of  view,  yet  it  is  the  point  of 


OXFORD:  JOWETT  33 

view  that  has  to  be  emphasized  to  bring  out 
his  relation  to  a  certain  sort  of  pupil.  Sy- 
monds  had  already  heard  much  of  work,  of 
the  necessity  of  achieving  something  in  the 
orthodox  way,  of  the  prime  necessity  of  util- 
izing all  culture  in  action.  The  habit  of  hard 
work  he  had  acquired,  as  also  the  fire  in  his  own 
heart,  made  plain  now  that  he  was  in  no  ulti- 
mate danger  of  shoddy  dilettantism.  A  des- 
tiny of  outward  achievement  was  already 
marked  out  for  him,  which  only  his  physical 
weakness  could  interfere  with.  But  his  per- 
sonality had  had  no  guidance.  Within  he  was 
vague,  impressionable,  chaotic,  ardent.  His 
inner  self  was  all  for  poetry,  for  creation;  his 
outer  circumstances  more  and  more  were  bend- 
ing him  toward  criticism,  scholarship,  "sub- 
stantiality," toward  everything  that  universi- 
ties know  how  to  deal  with.  This  general  ten- 
dency Jowett  confirmed. 

Not  alone  Jowett,  of  course,  but  Oxford  al- 
together. Other  Oxford  poets,  Clough  espe- 
cially, had  broken  their  hearts  with  doubt  and 
patched  them  up  again  with  work.  The  real 
malady  of  Oxford  was  want  of  faith  in  life. 


34    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

Wanting  that,  theology  had  provided  them 
with  something  to  believe  in,  and  when  at  Ox- 
ford theology  fell  an  appalling  vacuum  re- 
mained. Only  by  some  such  explanation  can 
we  grasp  the  significance  of  that  "cosmic  en- 
thusiasm" which  took  such  hold  on  the  succeed- 
ing generation  and  made  Walt  Whitman  the 
prophet  of  a  new  religion.  Wherever  life  is  at 
low  ebb  system  flourishes.  Therefore  I  find 
significance  in  the  remark  of  Goldwin  Smith  in 
his  Memoirs.,  that  he  could  never  get  much 
from  Emerson's  writings  because  he  could 
"find  no  system"  in  them.  Goldwin  Smith 
and  his  fellow-Oxonians  of  that  day  would 
have  been  puzzled  by  Nietzsche's  aphorism  that 
"the  will  to  system  is  a  lack  of  rectitude." 
Such  minds  are  bound  to  believe  that  the  lack 
of  system  in  Emerson,  or  indeed  in  the  Gospel, 
is  only  a  weakness.  That  it  is  the  essential  con- 
dition of  all  illuminated  thought,  from  the 
Analects  of  Confucius  to  Sartor  Resartus, 
they  could  not  have  divined  at  all.  The  will  to 
system  built  the  Roman  Empire,  but  that 
is  all  one  can  say  of  it  except  that  it  built  the 
British  Empire  too.  And  Symonds,  who 


OXFORD:  JOWETT  35 

should  have  been  in  another  world,  was  living 
among  the  kind  of  men  who  build  empires. 

His  first  meeting  with  Jowett,  though  it  an- 
ticipated by  a  year  the  close  and  lifelong  inti- 
macy of  master  and  pupil,  is  worth  repeating 
in  his  own  words.  In  the  autumn  of  1858, 
upon  first  enrolling  at  Balliol,  Symonds  bore  a 
letter  to  the  great  man  from  his  father,  who 
had  lately  met  him  in  Oxford.  "I  found  him 
dozing  in  an  armchair  over  a  dying  fire.  His 
rooms  were  then  in  Fisher  Buildings,  looking 
out  upon  the  Broad.  It  was  a  panelled  room, 
with  old-fashioned  wooden  mantel-piece.  He 
roused  himself,  looked  at  the  letter,  looked  at 
me,  and  said,  half  dreamily,  'I  do  not  think  I 
know  your  father.'  Then,  after  an  awkward 
pause,  he  rose,  and  added,  'Good-bye,  Mr. 
Symonds.' '  An  inauspicious  opening,  cer- 
tainly; but  it  appears  that  Jowett  had  a  way 
of  dreaming  over  the  fire  and  was  by  habit 
short  in  manner  and  a  silent  man.  To  be  in- 
vited to  his  breakfast  parties  was  the  most  cov- 
eted honor  in  Oxford;  yet  nothing  was  said, 
Jowett  "stared  vacantly,"  everyone  was  awk- 
ward and  unhappy — "the  toast  was  heard 


36    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

crunching  under  desperate  jaws  of  youths  ex- 
asperated by  their  helplessness  and  silence." 

Before  he  came  into  close  contact  with  Jow- 
ett,  Symonds  fell  in  with  many  of  the  older 
Oxford  men  then  or  subsequently  famous: 
Goldwin  Smith,  Dean  Stanley,  Mark  Patti- 
son,  his  future  brother-in-law  T.  H.  Green, 
and  Professor  Conington.  With  the  last  of 
these  he  became  almost  immediately  intimate. 

Conington  seems  to  have  been  a  kind  of  in- 
tellectual bully,  a  hard  man,  who  tasked  Sy- 
monds unmercifully  on  the  score  of  scholar- 
ship without  having  the  least  opinion  of  his 
powers.  Here  as  elsewhere  it  was  a  case  of 
incompatible  temperaments,  and  as  elsewhere 
Symonds  exhibited  his  unhappy  faculty  for 
stumbling  into  the  wrong  hands.  Conington 
knew  and  cared  for  nothing  but  literature, 
and  in  the  strictly  academic  sense.  Art,  music, 
nature,  philosophy,  life  he  passed  by.  Beside 
the  standard  of  human  capacity  set  up  in  his 
mind,  Symonds  appeared  a  very  wavering,  in- 
effectual creature  indeed,  continually  needing 
to  be  reminded  of  his  inaccuracy,  languor,  and 
general  vagueness.  He  criticised  his  pupil  for 


OXFORD:  JOWETT  37 

wanting  force  and  distinction  in  style  and  for 
"shady  fluency,"  and  he  was  openly  vexed 
when  that  pupil  won  the  Newdigate  Prize. 
Yet  he  never  suggested  any  practicable  way 
in  which  his  faults  could  be  overcome.  While 
Symonds,  already  formulating  the  cosmic 
principle  "Though  He  slay  me,  yet  will  I 
cleave  to  Him,"  in  his  turn  no  sooner  learned 
that  his  old  master  was  dead  than  he  set  about 
admirably  editing  his  Miscellanies.  That  Con- 
ington's  influence,  however  limited,  was  most 
helpful  to  him — and  helpful  because  of  its 
limitation,  because  it  more  or  less  clubbed  him 
into  form — is  proved  by  his  later  statement 
that,  while  Jowett  taught  him  to  write,  Coning- 
ton  taught  him  to  see  that  "literature  is  some- 
thing by  itself,  not  part  of  an  iridescent  neb- 
ula, including  all  our  cult  for  loveliness." 
Without  doubt  he  was  dealing,  however  stu- 
pidly, with  a  difficult  case.  "The  association 
with  Conington  was  almost  wholly  good," 
wrote  Symonds  in  his  Autobiography. 

It  was  an  atmosphere  of  criticism,  and  in  a 
more  and  more  critical  spirit  Symonds  threw 
himself  into  aesthetic  studies :  Greek  poets,  Ho- 


38   JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

man  history,  music,  Plato,  St.  Augustine, 
Goethe.  Stirred  to  religious  speculation  by  the 
reactionary  sermons  of  Bishop  Wilberforce, 
he  fought  bitterly  against  the  sceptical  ten- 
dency of  his  own  mind.  It  seemed,  he  said, 
to  "check  the  unity  of  thought  and  will,  and 
certainly  to  impair  the  a?sthetical  enthusiasm." 
This  latter  proved  curiously  the  case  with  him, 
and  he  discovered  that  his  enjoyment  of  music 
became  less  spontaneous.  "I  analyze  and  try  to 
enjoy  more;  I  have  fewer  ideas  and  less  delight 
in  hearing."  This  he  attributed  to  a  weakened 
faith  in  the  supernatural.  It  was  really  caused 
by  the  weakening  of  his  emotional  power 
through  his  excessive  mental  activity.  It  is 
worth  noting  incidentally  that  as  his  religious 
speculation  became  acute  he  turned  his  back 
on  the  aesthetics  of  religion  which  had  drawn 
him  passively  into  ritualism.  Perpetual  read- 
ing, writing,  discussing,  analyzing,  criticising, 
comparing  notes — all  this  he  had  in  feverish 
abundance.  He  was  constantly  over-exerting 
himself,  writing  an  essay  a  day,  on  subjects 
ranging  from  Swiss  history — already  one  of 
his  fields  of  interest — to  the  Criminal  liespon- 


OXFORD:  JOWETT  39 

sibility  of  Lunatics ;  as  well  as  countless  poems. 
His  diary  meanwhile  contains  recurring  notes 
like  this :  "slept  very  ill — a  night  of  overtaxed 
brain,  and  constant  weary  dreams.  I  must  be- 
gin some  strychnine,  I  feel  so  low,"  or  "return 
of  old  cramped  head  feeling,"  or  "curious  talk 
of  my  want  of  sympathy,  ambition,  mad  sui- 
cidal fancies."  Body  and  brain  racked  and 
rushed,  brought  up  against  those  hard,  clear, 
successful  intellects,  he  was  running  riot 
within.  A  profound  nostalgia,  deeper  than 
homesickness — what  he  called  S eelenselinsuclit 
—possessed  him.  "The  common  defect  of  all 
aesthetics,"  he  writes,  "is  that  they  raise  a 
yearning  which  cannot  be  satisfied  by  them- 
selves except  in  creation."  He  fluttered  about 
the  arts,  drawn  almost  equally  to  all.  For  a 
time  music  overshadowed  the  rest  in  his  en- 
thusiasm, and  he  believed  that  with  proper 
training  he  might  ultimately  find  himself  in 
musical  expression.  This  tendency  must  have 
been  stimulated  by  a  visit  to  Clifton  in  1862, 
where  he  found  Jenny  Lind  spending  some 
days  in  his  father's  house.  In  his  diary  he 
reported  his  conversations  with  her:  "She  com- 


ments  on  the  charm  of  having  a  definite  line 
in  life,  an  art  to  live  for,"  and  says  much  of 
the  kind  of  poetry  which  is  suitable  for  sing- 
ing. "For  singing  we  must  have  one  feeling, 
one  harmony,  not  a  series  of  broken  lights." 
So  calm,  intuitive,  self-possessed — artist,  not 
sesthetician — the  image  of  all  that  Symonds 
had  not  yet  found  and  wrould  never  quite  find 
on  his  own  horizon!  One  feels  already  that 
this  universal  aesthetic  ferment  of  his  must 
ultimately  simmer  down  to  criticism,  that  it  is 
too  much  a  "series  of  broken  lights"  to  lead 
him  into  limited  creation. 

Of  the  suggestive  events  of  his  undergrad- 
uate life  only  a  few  can  be  selected  here.  Ex- 
amined in  the  spring  of  1859,  he  failed  to  con- 
jugate correctly,  tense  by  tense,  the  verbs 
« i  M  i  and  « 7  /M  e;  a  notable  fact  in  one  who  was 
to  write  what  Frederic  Harrison  called  the 
classical  and  authoritative  account  of  Greek 
literature.  It  gives  color  to  the  statement 
made  by  him  and  by  his  critics  that  he  was  by 
nature  inaccurate  in  rudiments.  But  it  gives 
more  color  to  the  charge  against  examinations 
as  a  real  test  of  knowledge  in  sensitive  minds 


OXFORD:  JOWETT  41 

which  are  easily  confused,  for  as  he  said  he 
would  have  had  no  readier  command  of  the 
multiplication  table.  In  the  summer  of  that 
year  he  joined  a  reading  party  to  the  east 
coast,  an  experience  repeated  several  times 
later  in  the  Lakes  and  North  Wales — just 
such  reading  parties,  "bathing  and  reading 
and  roaming",  as  Clough  describes  in  the 
Bothie:  Green  sympathetically  helping  him  in 
Plato,  Conington  spurring,  piquing,  prodding 
him  in  composition  and  language.  And  in 
the  summer  of  1860  he  won  the  Newdigate 
Prize  writh  his  poem  The  Escorial,  which  he 
recited  on  June  20  in  the  Theatre.  Coning- 
ton, as  I  have  said,  was  vexed  by  this  occur- 
rence, having  been  twice  unsuccessful  in  the 
same  competition.  Matthew  Arnold,  the  Pro- 
fessor of  Poetry,  chastened  him  with  sound 
words  which  were  to  apply  with  considerable 
accuracy  to  all  of  Symonds'  verse:  that  he 
had  won  "not  because  of  his  stylistic  qualities, 
but  because  he  had  intellectually  grasped  the 
subject,  and  used  its  motives  better  and  more 
rationally  than  his  competitors." 

Short  tours  to  the  Continent  were  frequent 


throughout  this  period:  in  the  autumn  of  1860 
through  Belgium  and  again  through  Germany 
to  Vienna,  in  the  spring  of  1861  to  Paris  and 
Amiens,  and  in  the  following  June  with  his 
father  to  Switzerland  and  Italy, — his  first 
visit  to  the  home  and  studio  of  his  later  life. 
Every  detail  of  these  tours  is  noted  in  his 
diary,  wild  flowers,  pictures,  minute  points  in 
architecture.  In  Switzerland  he  found  him- 
self an  agile  climber  and  formed  that  com- 
radely sympathy  with  Swiss  peasants  which 
proved  the  great  motive  of  his  after  years. 
On  the  Mer  de  Glace  his  father  took  from  his 
pocket  a  volume  of  the  Princess  and  read 
"Come  down,  O  maid,  from  yonder  mountain 
height" — the  good,  busy  father,  always  finding 
in  Tennyson  something  to  read  aloud  in  ap- 
propriate places.  The  bent  of  his  own  mind 
is  illustrated  by  his  remarks  on  an  English- 
man in  the  train  to  Como,  whose  "cunning  cold 
gray  eyes,  sharp  pale  face,  fresh  light  hair 
and  thin  lips"  made  evident  that  he  had  studied 
physical  science  exclusively.  To  Symonds, 
who  had  already  begun  to  form  for  Switzer- 
land that  passion  which  led  him  to  say  subse- 


OXFORD:  JOWETT  43 

quently,  and  with  literal  truth,  "the  Alps  are 
my  religion",  he  seems  to  have  appeared  as 
Tyndall  appears  in  the  famous  remark,  "At 
sunrise  we  came  among  the  Alps;  they  were 
of  sandstone,  stratified  very  regularly."  In 
Ruskin  alone,  I  think,  do  we  find  the  two 
points  of  view — the  religious  and  the  geolog- 
ical— united  in  any  eminent  degree. 

I  have  a  mind  in  this  place  to  quote  from  his 
diary  the  description  of  a  mountain  storm  wit- 
nessed on  his  return  to  England.  It  illustrates 
his  feeling  for  natural  scenery,  his  earliest  sen- 
timent for  the  Alps,  and  the  degree  to  which, 
at  this  period,  all  his  lines  of  thought  con- 
verged in  music.  It  illustrates  too  his  early 
style  and  his  gift  for  highly  colored  prose: 

"Friday,  August  2  (1861). — Conington  and 
I  walked  through  Redland  to  the  Sea  Walls 
and  home  by  the  observatory.  There  we 
watched  a  great  thunder  cloud,  which  for 
majesty  of  shape,  size  and  color  surpassed  the 
Alps.  Its  change  and  progress  was  like  a  sym- 
phony. Far  away,  from  west  to  north  it 
stretched;  above  the  channel  the  summits 
were  of  the  pearliest  white;  domes  and  peaks, 


44    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

on  which  the  sunlight  rested ;  its  middle  was  of 
light  ethereal  blue,  like  the  base  of  Monte 
Rosa,  but  its  feet  were  indigo,  and  a  tawny 
fringe  of  angry  red  was  driven,  mixed  with 
wind  and  tempest,  all  along  the  van.  First 
it  towered  in  simple  beauty,  transfigured  with 
the  sunlight  that  sat  upon  it,  pouring  bands 
of  glory  down  its  chasms,  and  shooting  in 
broad  columns  on  the  trees  and  rocks  and 
downs — ever  changing  with  the  changing  wind 
and  scudding  fleecy  sands,  fleeces  that  ran  be- 
fore the  armaments  of  thunder.  Soon  this 
aspect  altered ;  more  and  more  of  the  blue  sky 
was  hidden  as  the  masses  rose — the  cerulean 
blue  was  changed  to  deepest  purple,  and  the 
indigo  to  sullen  black.  The  wind  swept  furi- 
ously, the  cloud  came  onward  in  a  crescent, 
the  sun  was  darkened,  and  scarcely  flamed 
upon  the  topmost  edges,  and  in  a  breath  the 
gust  of  wind  and  rain  were  dashed  upon  us. 
For  a  moment  all  was  dark  and  the  landscape 
blurred,  the  vivid  greens  and  delicately  pen- 
cilled outlines  of  the  hills  were  gone,  the  wind 
howled  restlessly.  But  this  again  changed. 
The  cloud  had  broken  with  its  own  furv.  Like 


OXFORD:  JOWETT  45 

a  squadron  that  rides  upon  the  foeman's  guns 
and  sweeps  them  off,  and  then  returns  scat- 
tered and  decimated  to  its  camp,  so  this  pon- 
derous mass  of  thunder-cloud  was  tattered, 
rent,  and  dissipated  by  the  fury  of  its  onset 
— its  domes  were  ragged,  and  beneath  its  feet 
shone  streaks  of  lurid  sky,  on  which  the 
jagged  tops  of  the  firs  and  beeches  trembled. 
Now  came  the  last  movement  of  the  symphony 
—all  the  landscape  was  grey,  but  clear,  and 
full  of  watery  sunlight.  An  exhaustion  like 
that  of  a  child  fallen  asleep  from  crying 
seemed  to  hold  the  winds  and  woods  and  dis- 
tant plain.  All  was  calm,  but  the  broken 
clouds  went  sailing  on  overhead,  dizzy  with 
their  own  confusion,  and,  as  it  were,  a  ground 
swell  of  its  passion  still  rocked  the  upper  air. 
We  turned  and  went  homeward.  In  this  sym- 
phony, or  sonata,  call  it  which  you  like,  there 
were  three  distinct  movements — an  Adagio,  an 
Allegro,  a  Presto,  and  a  Minuet.  It  should 
have  been  written  in  D  flat,  and  no  passage 
should  have  been  free  from  agitation.  But 
the  first  part  should  have  most  beauty.  It 
should  contain  the  germinal  idea  of  the  whole 


46  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

in  a  tremulous  thought  constantly  recurring, 
and  superinduced  upon  an  air  of  calm  ma- 
jestic sublimity,  which  should  be  the  basis  of 
the  movement.  This  agitation  should  gradu- 
ally usurp  the  place  of  the  calm  air  in  the 
second  movement.  In  the  third  it  should  reign 
supreme — all  mere  beauty  should  be  lost  in  the 
tempestuous  passion.  In  the  last  the  calm  air 
of  the  first  movement  should  return,  but  shorn 
of  any  superfluous  ornament,  sad  and  melan- 
choly, and  often  troubled  by  faint  echoes  of 
the  central  spasm." 

Meditations  like  this,  more  successful  in  les- 
ser fragments,  make  one  feel  that  in  time 
Symonds  might  have  produced  one  lasting 
book,  a  purely  personal  book.  Had  it  not  been 
for  circumstances  which  tossed  him  back  and 
forth  between  his  inner  self  and  the  outer 
world — dragging  from  him  works  which  are 
neither  quite  true  to  fact  not  yet  quite  true 
to  the  poet's  consciousness,  he  might  have  left 
such  a  permanent  book  as  the  Opium  Confes- 
sions or  Amiel's  Journal.  This  kind  of  pro- 
duction however  meant  nothing  to  Jowett  and 


OXFORD:  JOWETT  47 

Conington,    and    Symonds   took   their   word 
for  it. 

At  Oxford  his  intellect  had  been  rushed  far 
ahead  of  anything  the  total  man  could  sup- 
port. It  was  ten  years  before  the  rest  of  him 
could  grow  up  to  his  precocious  ability,  before 
there  was  any  coalescence  between  brain  and 
nerves.  It  may  be  doubted  whether  he  ever 
shook  off,  even  in  his  last,  most  human,  active 
period  in  Switzerland,  the  burden  of  satiety 
that  results  from  such  excesses  of  aesthetic 
stimulation.  His  emotional  nature  was  baf- 
fled. He  was  in  a  state  of  anarchy.  Work, 
duty,  cerebration  had  not  been  properly  related 
to  his  insistent  need  of  self-expression.  "I 
could  mention  men,"  he  says,  "who  might  have 
been  musicians  or  painters,  but  who  wasted 
their  time  at  Oxford  in  aimless  strumming  on 
the  piano,  or  silly  sketching,  because  there  was 
no  career  of  industry  provided  for  them.  They 
served  the  curriculum  badly.  Their  natural 
talents  found  no  strengthening  exercise. 
.  .  .  With  this  latter  sort  I  can  class  my- 
self. I  went  philandering  around  music,  her- 
aldry, the  fine  arts,  and  literary  studies  ruled 


48   JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

by  sentiment.  I  wrote  weak  poetry.  I 
dreamed  in  ante-chapels.  I  mooned  in  canoes 
along  the  banks  of  the  Cherwell,  or  among 
yellow  water-lilies  at  Godstow.  .  .  .  But 
in  all  these  things  I  got  no  grasp  on  any 
serious  business." 

The  practicality  and  the  scepticism  of  Jow- 
ett  were,  in  short,  precisely  those  qualities  to 
which  Symonds  ought  not  to  have  been  sub- 
jected. Impracticality,  properly  guided,  and 
faith,  in  himself  and  in  life,  he  needed.  It 
was  impossible  to  make  a  good  routine  man 
of  him,  but  it  was  highly  possible  to  turn  him 
out  a  wretched  member  of  that  modern 
race  which  has  been  shipwrecked  on  the  arts. 
Esthetic  stimulation  had  made  some  sort  of 
expression  an  actual  physiological  need,  while 
his  training  had  not  provided  him  with 
strength,  faculty,  or  direction.  In  his  diary 
he  notes  the  "brooding  self-analysis  without 
creation"  that  afflicts  him.  And  in  another 
passage  (September  29,  1861)  a  propos  of 
Lewes's  Life  of  Goethe,,  he  pictures  the  exact 
condition  of  his  mind. 

"Reading  this  life  teaches  me  how  much  of 


OXFORD:  JOWETT  49 

a  poet's  soul  a  man  may  have  without  being 
a  poet,  what  high  yearnings  may  plague  him 
without  his  ever  satisfying  them,  what  a  vast 
appreciation  and  desire  may  exist  where  there 
is  no  expression  or  formative  will.  And  in  all 
these  cases  the  force  is  wanting,  power  is  ab- 
sent, spontaneity  is  torpid.  Susceptibility  to 
beauty,  capabilities  of  acute  pain  and  pleas- 
ure, strong  sesthetical  emotions,  these  do  not 
constitute  a  poet,  though  a  poet  must  have 
them.  .  .  .  Power,  all-pervading  power, 
pushing  the  soul  into  activity  beyond  recep- 
tive susceptibility,  covering  all  deficiency  by 
concentrating  itself  on  the  passion  of  the 
moment — this  makes  the  difference  between 
the  man  of  genius  and  the  dilettante  driv- 
eller." 

An  age  that  is,  or  has  been,  interested  in 
such  characters  as  that  of  Amiel  should  note 
well  how  they  are  produced,  for  Symonds  is 
the  closest  of  all  English  equivalents  of  Amiel. 
Intellectual  and  emotional  sophistication, 
poetry  bottled  up  and  fermenting  in  minds 
that  lack  vitality — this  produces  that  amour 
de  ^impossible  prith  all  its  chimeras  and  in- 


50    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

visible  hippogriffs,  just  as,  according  to  Vic- 
tor Hugo,  the  Apocalypse  sprang  from  a  pent- 
up  virginity.  The  difference  between  Amiel 
and  Symonds  is  mainly  a  difference  of  will. 
Incapable  of  that  prolonged  and  chronic  ten- 
sion which  brought  the  malady  of  Amiel  to 
such  exquisite  heights  and  has  made  it  immor- 
tal, Symonds  was  capable  of  compromise  with 
the  ideal.  In  the  very  passage  from  which  I 
have  just  quoted  he  goes  on  to  say:  "A  man 
may  have  the  susceptibilities  of  genius  with- 
out any  of  its  creative  power;  but  if  he  has 
an  atom  of  talent  he  cannot  be  without  prac- 
tical energy."  This  indicates  his  readiness  to 
accept  a  makeshift.  It  is  true  that  Symonds, 
to  the  end  of  his  days,  pursued  the  Absolute 
with  a  hopeless  passion.  That  alone  is  a  mark 
of  ill-health;  for  men  who  find  themselves  live 
gladly  in  the  relative,  and  the  greatest  philos- 
ophers content  themselves  with  a  working-plan. 
Symonds  himself  in  later  years  discovered  a 
working-plan,  which  enabled  him  to  live  with 
assurance  and  to  produce  an  immense  quan- 
tity of  adequate  work.  But  his  life  as  man  of 


OXFORD:  JOWETX  51 

letters  was,  I  think,  really  incidental.  It  was 
the  expression  of  his  natural  energy,  the  satis- 
faction of  his  impulse  for  style,  the  unburden- 
ing of  his  tangible  knowledge.  His  real  self 
was  always  hidden,  essentially  unexpressed. 


CHAPTER   III 

YOUTH  I     WANDERINGS 

WHEN  Symonds  took  his  degree  on 
June  22,  1862,  he  was  truly,  as  he  de- 
scribed himself  five  years  later,  "like  a  sphere 
in  contact  at  all  points  with  nature,  poetry, 
painting,  philosophy,  music,  passion,  yet  with- 
out a  motive  force  within  it."  A  far-sighted 
reader  might  see  in  this  very  situation  the  per- 
sonal tabula  rasa  upon  which  ultimately  criti- 
cism would  appear.  But  the  lack  of  a  motive 
force  did  not  proceed  from  any  tranquillity 
within.  Five  years  had  yet  to  pass  before  the 
mischievous  ferment  of  Oxford  reached  its 
agonizing  climax,  and  five  more  before  the 
heated  brain  settled  down  to  productive 
activity.  His  first  book  was  published  in  1872 ; 
but  from  1807  onward  he  began  to  see  more 
and  more  clearly  the  possibility  of  a  rational 
existence.  The  ten  years  18G2-1871  may  there- 

52 


YOUTH:    WANDERINGS        53 

fore  be  considered  his  period  of  probation.  In 
the  first  of  these  years  he  left  college,  in  the 
last  his  father  died ;  and  the  death  of  his  good 
father,  as  we  shall  see,  brought  him  perma- 
nently to  his  feet.  The  crisis  of  1867,  midway 
between  these  two  events,  marks  the  end  of  his 
exclusively  intellectual  period.  Thereafter,  at 
first  weakly  and  lamely,  but  with  growing 
assurance  and  power,  he  made  his  peace  with 
life. 

It  is  my  belief  that  the  five  years  of  Sy- 
monds'  life  during  which  he  reaped  the  whirl- 
wind of  Oxford  aestheticism  form,  as  told  in 
his  letters  and  diaries,  the  most  appalling  rec- 
ord of  its  kind  in  English  literature.  But  in 
the  midst  of  the  whirlwind  and  almost  un- 
known to  himself  the  critic  was  quite  surely 
beginning  his  true  education,  gathering  his 
materials,  shaking  down  his  impressions,  form- 
ing his  method.  During  these  chaotic  years 
the  main  lines  of  his  after  life  were  deter- 
mined. 

A  tour  through  northern  Italy  aroused  in  a 
much  more  definite  way  than  heretofore  his  in- 
terest in  painting.  The  Venetian  school  espe- 


54    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

cially  captivated  him  because  of  its  preoccupa- 
tion with  life.  Returning  in  August  to  Clif- 
ton, he  began  a  book  of  private  studies,  labelled 
Art  and  Literature,  with  an  essay  on  the  char- 
acteristics of  Venetian  art.  He  was  begin- 
ning to  feel  his  way  into  the  theory  of  the 
milieu,  which  was  to  underlie  all  his  critical 
writings.  Music  continued  to  occupy  him. 
After  a  performance  of  Haydn's  Creation  at 
Gloucester  we  find  him  associating  it  with  his 
Biblical  and  Platonic  studies  and  trying  to  es- 
tablish a  theoretical  relation  between  music 
and  the  other  arts.  But  here,  as  in  all  his  spec- 
ulations, there  is  a  significant  conflict  of  mo- 
tives. "It  illustrates,"  as  his  biographer,  Mr. 
Brown,  says,  "the  governing  qualities  of  Sy- 
monds'  personality,  acute  sensibility  and  in- 
tense intellectual  activity;  he  felt  profoundly 
through  his  aesthetic  sensibility,  but  his  intel- 
lectual vigor  would  not  let  him  rest  there;  he 
desired  to  know  as  well  as  to  feel.  .  .  .  As 
it  was,  the  internal  clash  and  conflict  of  two 
such  powerful  appetites  inside  a  delicate  frame 
were  wearing  and  grinding  the  man  to  pow- 
der." True  criticism  is  not  a  second  best,  not. 


YOUTH:    WANDERINGS        55 

as  it  is  often  supposed,  a  compromise  in  theory 
on  the  part  of  men  who  cannot  succeed  in  prac- 
tice. It  is  a  wholly  different  function,  the  in- 
tellectual study  of  origins  and  relations.  It 
regards  the  work  of  art,  not  as  a  record  per- 
sonal to  the  critic,  but  as  a  specimen  to  be  in- 
vestigated dispassionately,  intellectually,  in  its 
relation  both  to  art  and  to  life.  The  difficulty 
with  Symonds  at  this  period  was  that  he  could 
not  disentangle  the  objective  and  the  subjec- 
tive. He  felt  every  work  of  art  as  a  poet, 
and  at  the  same  time  could  not  refrain  from 
analyzing  it.  For  this  reason  neither  the  one 
impulse  nor  the  other  could  function  properly. 
"I  am  discontented,"  he  wrote,  "because  I  do 
not  feel  myself  a  poet,  and  do  not  see  why  I 
should  not  be  one."  To  the  choruses  and  ora- 
torios of  Handel,  Haydn,  Mendelssohn,  he 
brought  the  touchstone,  not  of  a  rationale  of 
music,  but  of  his  own  feverish  religious  diffi- 
culties ;  or  rather  the  two  were  perilously  inter- 
twined. To  quote  Mr.  Brown  once  more: 
"The  situation  seems  clear  enough;  in  one  re- 
gion emotion  and  intellect  are  at  war,  in  the 
other  thought  and  action.  Emotions  generate 


56    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

a  passion,  an  appetite;  intellect  analyzes  the 
emotions  into  thoughts;  thought  is  unsatisfy- 
ing to  the  appetite  which  emotion  has  created, 
and  that  appetite  demands  the  translation  of 
the  thought  into  action,  but  health  and  con- 
science bar  the  way."  In  those  really  penetrat- 
ing sentences  we  have  the  whole  story  of  Sy- 
monds — that  complex  remained  with  him  to 
the  last.  And  although  it  ultimately  resolved 
itself  partially  in  action  when  he  had  gained 
a  semblance  of  health  and  discovered  types  of 
action  from  which  he  was  not  debarred  by 
conscience,  he  never  quite  shook  off  the  dead- 
lock inherent  in  his  nature.  "It  is  one  of  the 
most  terrible  results  of  introspection,"  he 
wrote  now,  "that  I  find  the  weakness,  vicious 
tendencies,  morbid  sensibilities,  and  discontent 
deepened  and  intensified  by  all  that  I  have 
learned  in  study  and  by  all  that  I  have  lost 
in  faith.  Old  realities  have  become  shadows, 
but  these  shadows  still  torment  me.  There  is 
a  restlessness  of  passion,  an  unending  want  of 
what  can  never  be,  that  seem  the  peculiar 
Nemesis  of  a  scholar's  life.  ...  I  hear 
the  great  world  of  fact  and  action  roaring  for- 


YOUTH:   WANDERINGS        57 

ever  around  me  unintelligibly;  my  own  sphere 
is  one  of  phantoms,  and  my  own  battle  a  mere 
sciomachy.  Thoughts  and  words  are  the  men 
and  things  I  deal  with;  but  they  are  direful 
realities,  full  of  suasions  to  passion,  and  mad- 
dening with  impossible  visions  of  beauty.  This 
constant  contact  with  the  intangible  results,  in 
a  word,  in  the  state  of  Faust."  Along  with 
this  runs  the  unceasing  undertone  of  bodily 
ailment:  "My  scalp  is  sore  and  my  bones 
tingle";  "my  head  is  full  of  neuralgic  pains, 
my  eyes  feel  boiled  and  are  regular  centres  of 
agony,  to  move  which  is  to  set  two  instruments 
of  torture  in  motion";  "a  strained  feeling  in 
my  head." 

At  the  end  of  October,  1862,  he  was  unani- 
mously elected  Fellow  of  Magdalen,  and  on 
the  first  of  November  he  went  into  residence. 
The  episode  of  his  fellowship  was  brief  and 
unhappy.  We  hear  of  his  having  a  little  group 
of  six  pupils  in  philosophy  and,  what  is  more 
significant,  beginning  a  systematic  study  of 
the  Renaissance,  which  resulted  presently  in 
his  winning  the  Chancellor's  Prize  with  an 
essay  on  that  subject.  A  former  friend  ma- 


58    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

liciously  sought  to  prove  a  charge  against  his 
character.  The  charge  was  a  complete  fiasco; 
but  in  his  overstrained  condition  it  naturally 
increased  his  morbid  shyness,  rendering  any- 
thing like  an  easy  friendship  with  the  other 
Fellows  impossible,  and  served  mainly  in  pre- 
cipitating his  final  collapse.  This  seems  to 
have  occurred  in  April.  He  awoke  one  morn- 
ing after  an  unusually  frightful  dream  with 
the  feeling  that  "something  serious  had  hap- 
pened to  his  brain."  And  indeed  so  it  proved. 
Thereafter  for  three  years  he  was  unable  to 
use  either  eyes  or  brain  for  severe  study.  What 
effect  this  had  on  the  ultimate  work  of  a  mind 
naturally  weak  in  its  grasp  of  rudiments  and 
constantly  impressionable  may  be  imagined  by 
anyone  who  has  formed  an  idea  of  Symonds* 
place  in  English  criticism.  During  the  spring 
of  this  year  he  struggled  as  well  as  he  could 
to  complete  his  prize  essay,  which  was  finally 
recited  before  the  Prince  and  Princess  of 
Wales.  It  was  the  closing  event  of  his  Ox- 
ford career. 

On    June    25    Dr.    Symonds    sent    him   to 
Switzerland.    This  Alpine  summer  was  a  kind 


YOUTH:    WANDERINGS        59 

of  pastoral  interlude — the  only  really  poetical 
episode  in  Symonds'  vexed  life.  Miirren  was 
for  some  time  his  headquarters.  Thither  came 
one  day  an  English  family,  Mr.  Frederick 
North,  member  of  Parliament  for  Hastings, 
with  his  two  daughters.  The  elder  was  Miss 
Marianne  North,  the  flower-painter,  whose  col- 
lection of  sketches  from  rare  tropical  plants 
was  housed  after  her  death  in  a  special  build- 
ing at  Kew.  The  younger,  Catherine,  was  de- 
scribed by  Symonds  in  his  diary  at  the  time 
as  "dark  and  thin  and  slight,  nervous  and  full 
of  fun  and  intellectual  acumen."  And  he 
adds,  "Alpine  inns  are  favorable  places  for 
hatching  acquaintance  and  gaining  insight 
into  character."  The  Norths  went  away  at 
the  end  of  a  week,  but  Symonds  had  formed 
an  impression  which  he  was  very  soon  to  trans- 
late into  action.  Another  girl,  meanwhile,  had 
taken  his  fancy  as  the  special  genius  of  the 
place  and  the  embodiment  of  all  its  shining 
suggestions.  He  calls  her  "Mile  R —  E — , 
daughter  of  a  jeweller  in  Thun."  She  was  a 
friend  of  the  innkeeper  at  Miirren,  and  she 
helped  him  in  the  care  of  his  guests.  She  wore 


60    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

a  charming  Bernese  costume,  and  after  the 
evening  work  was  done  she  would  sit  with  the 
other  girls  on  the  balcony  and  they  would  all 
sing  together.  For  her  each  morning  he 
picked  bouquets  of  Alpine  flowers,  "climbing 
daily  higher  and  higher  up  the  mountains  as 
the  summer  flowers  retreated,  until  at  last 
there  were  few  left  but  white  lilac  crocuses  and 
deep  blue  harebells."  She  was  the  subject  of 
many  sonnets;  but  when  she  found  that  Sy- 
monds  had  come  back  again  to  Murren  pur- 
posely to  see  her  she  kept  shyly  apart,  not  un- 
derstanding "what  all  this  meant."  She  con- 
sented however  to  stand  sponsor  with  him  at 
the  christening  of  a  little  daughter  of  one  of 
the  guides.  At  the  christening  too  was  T.  II. 
Green  of  Oxford,  his  future  brother-in-law, 
fresh  from  Heidelberg,  his  head  swimming 
with  German  metaphysics  and  poetry.  With 
Green  he  passed  a  week  at  the  little  wooden  inn 
of  Uetliberg,  above  Zurich,  writing  and  study- 
ing at  little  beer-tables  set  beneath  the  beech- 
trees,  whose  opening  brandies  revealed  the 
far  view  below.  Some  of  the  poetry  of  this 
true  icandcrjahr  I  find  in  an  entry  of  Angus  I 


YOUTH:    WANDERINGS         61 

22,  which  resembles  in  a  striking  way  a  charac- 
teristic passage  of  Maurice  de  Guerin: 

"At  nine  this  morning  the  sun  shone  out. 
We  walked  together  in  the  deep  snow,  which 
lay  thick  upon  those  late  autumn  flowers. 
They,  poor  things,  revived  immediately  be- 
neath the  genial  warmth,  and  lifted  their 
pretty  heads  from  wrells  of  melting  snow- 
wreaths.  The  whole  world  seemed  to  feel  re- 
turning spring.  Birds  floated  in  dense  squad- 
rons overhead,  whirling  and  wheeling  on  the 
edges  of  the  clouds,  which  kept  rising  and  dis- 
persing in  the  eager  air  above  the  valley.  Far 
away  the  mists  rolled  like  sad  thoughts  that 
dissolve  in  tears." 

But  the  relief  and  happiness  of  this  Alpine 
episode  was  destined  to  be  short.  After  a  few 
weeks  in  England,  where  he  was  received  full 
fellow  at  Magdalen,  he  set  out  for  Italy  racked 
with  neuralgia  and  unable  to  read  or  write 
after  dark.  In  Florence  he  had  many  conver- 
sations with  Richard  Congreve,  the  English 
representative  of  Positivism  in  its  religious  as- 
pect. Symonds,  whose  faith  in  a  personal  God 
had  been  grievously  shaken,  and  whose  faith 


62    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

in  humanity  was  gaining  strength,  could  yet 
find  no  foothold  in  the  dogmatic  religion  of 
Humanity,  because  he  could  not  conceive  col- 
lective man  as  possessing  personality  or  con- 
sciousness, and  the  essence  of  religion  seemed 
to  him  a  personal  relationship  between  the  in- 
dividual and  the  Whole.  This  need  of  a  per- 
sonality animating  the  universe  he  never  shook 
off ;  later  it  modified,  or  tinged,  his  acceptance 
of  Spencerism,  and  it  is  significant  to  see  it 
emerging  thus  early,  at  the  moment  when  his 
secular  worship  of  humanity  was  on  the  point 
of  blossoming  forth.  Unable  to  use  eyes  or 
brain  for  serious  study,  he  was  thrown  upon 
more  sensuous  resources,  and  in  Florence  and 
Rome  he  gathered  quantities  of  direct  and  in- 
valuable experience  from  pictures  and  build- 
ings. At  Naples  the  old  nostalgia  for  the  im- 
possible awoke  again,  and  the  careless,  joyous, 
idle  existence  of  the  Italians  came  over  him  as 
a  kind  of  condemnation.  "The  world  is  wide, 
wide,  wide;  and  what  we  struggle  for,  ten 
thousand  happy  souls  in  one  fair  bay  have 
never  dreamed  of." 

In  March,  1861-,  he  returned  to  London  and 


YOUTH:    WANDERINGS        63 

took  lodgings  with  his  old  Oxford  friend  A. 
O.  Rutson  at  7,  Half  Moon  Street.  Five 
months  passed,  aimlessly.  He  could  neither 
sleep  nor  work,  and  the  nervous  need  of  in- 
cessant activity  preyed  upon  him.  He  wrote  a 
few  brief  articles  for  the  Saturday  Review  and 
took  what  exercise  he  could,  rowing  and  rid- 
ing. Subjected  to  an  extremely  painful  treat- 
ment of  his  eyes,  he  sat  on  one  chair  with  his 
feet  upon  another,  in  a  dark  room,  unable  to 
read  or  to  bear  the  light.  London  with  its 
noise  and  heat  and  the  desolation  of  loneliness 
brought  him  dreams  of  Miirren  and  of  the 
family  he  had  met  there.  He  formed  a  quick 
resolution,  called  upon  Mr.  North,  and  in  Au- 
gust joined  the  latter's  family  on  the  Conti- 
nent. On  the  10th  of  November  he  was  mar- 
ried to  Catherine  North  at  St.  Clement's 
Church,  Hastings.  Early  in  1865  he  returned 
with  his  wife  to  London  and  settled  in  lodg- 
ings at  13,  Albion  Street. 

Symonds  was  now  approaching  twenty- 
five.  The  desire  to  devote  himself  to  litera- 
ture had  formed  itself  gradually  and  more  and 
more  surely  in  his  mind.  Already  he  had  fallen 


64    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

into  the  three  lines  of  study  which  were  to  oc- 
cupy him  chiefly  as  a  man  of  letters — Greek 
poetry,  the  Renaissance,  and  the  Elizabethan 
Drama.  But  the  literary  purpose  was  not  to 
be  finally  confirmed  for  another  five  years. 
The  true  artist,  it  is  said,  will  doubt  himself  to 
the  end  of  his  days  but  will  never  doubt  his 
vocation.  Symonds  doubted  both,  and  it  was 
only  natural.  For  he  still  believed  more  in 
Jowett  and  his  father  than  in  himself:  his 
father  doubted  gravely  that  a  man  of  his  ex- 
treme fragility  could  spare  enough  energy 
from  mere  living  to  achieve  anything  of  solid 
worth  in  literature,  while  Jowett's  cautious  en- 
couragement was  vitiated  by  his  incurable 
doubt  of  everything.  His  education  had  un- 
done faith,  and  his  broken  health  seemed  to 
stand  in  the  way  of  hope.  At  the  same  time  he 
was  one  of  those  men  who  cannot  stand  still. 
The  wheels  of  his  life  went  on  grinding,  grind- 
ing, and  when  they  could  not  find  grist  with- 
out they  ground  themselves.  This  condition 
became  acutely  critical  in  the  summer  of  1805. 
He  had  set  up  lawyer's  chambers  to  give  his 
activity  an  ostensible  object  and  went  on  with 


YOUTH:    WANDERINGS         65 

his  Elizabethan  studies.  But  his  physical  con- 
dition rather  grew  worse — eyes  and  brain  al- 
most paralyzed,  the  smallest  excitement  shat- 
tering his  whole  system.  "For  a  few  hours," 
he  wrote,  "my  heart  has  beat,  my  senses  have 
received  impressions,  my  brain  has  coined  from 
them  vigorous  ideas.  But  vengeance  follows 
after  this  rejoicing.  Crack  go  nerves  and 
brain,  and  thought  and  sense  and  fancy  die." 
And  close  following  the  physical  comes  the 
spiritual  condition:  "To  emulate  others  nobler 
than  myself  is  my  desire.  But  I  cannot  get 
beyond,  create,  originate,  win  heaven  by  pray- 
ers and  faith,  have  trust  in  God,  and  concen- 
trate myself  upon  an  end  of  action.  .  .  . 
Literature,  with  these  eyes  and  brain?  What 
can  I  do?  What  learn?  How  teach?  How 
acquire  materials?  How  think?  How  write 
calmly,  equably,  judicially,  vigorously,  elo- 
quently for  years,  until  a  mighty  work  stands 
up  to  say,  'This  man  has  lived.  Take  notice, 
men,  this  man  had  nerves  unstrung,  blear  eyes, 
a  faltering  gait,  a  stammering  tongue,  and  yet 
he  added  day  by  day  labor  to  labor,  and 
achieved  his  end!' ' 


In  the  midst  of  this,  however,  two  powerful 
restorative  influences  were  taking  hold  upon 
him — his  wife  and  Walt  Whitman.  His  wife 
certainly  calmed  his  nervous  excitability  and 
made  his  life  gradually  more  rational  and  hu- 
man. And  his  discovery  of  Whitman's  writ- 
ings began  to  act  upon  his  moral  nature  as  a 
strong  tonic.  In  the  Cambridge  rooms  of  his 
friend  Frederic  Myers,  in  the  autumn  of  this 
year,  he  first  heard  read  aloud  passages  from 
Leaves  of  Grass.  "I  can  well  remember,"  he 
says  in  his  Study  of  Whitman,  "the  effect  of 
his  (Myers*)  sonorous  voice  rolling  out  sen- 
tence after  sentence,  sending  electric  thrills 
through  the  very  marrow  of  my  mind."  The 
reading  began  with  the  words  "Long  I 
thought  knowledge  alone  would  suffice  me," 
and  one  might  well  pause  on  these  words,  so 
profoundly  symbolic  of  this  moment  in  Sy- 
monds'  life.  Knowledge,  or  in  the  larger  sense 
all  that  is  implied  in  the  word  "cerebration," 
liad  occupied  him  almost  exclusively.  His 
health  and  education  had  almost  prevented  him 
from  living,  in  the  wide  sense,  at  all.  His 
bruin  had  v.hirled  on  regardless  of  nerves  and 


YOUTH:    WANDERINGS         67 

body,  struggling  to  grasp  the  absolute,  the  in- 
finite, the  impossible.  And  Whitman,  with  his 
lusty  contempt  for  purely  intellectual  pro- 
cesses, his  robust  sweep  of  realities,  and  the 
mystical  cosmic  sense  which  held  the  world  in 
solution,  came  over  the  young  student  like  a 
wave  of  sea-water,  invigorating,  refreshing, 
smoothing  out  the  heated  brain,  re- stringing 
the  nerves,  and  giving  him  a  new  point  of  de- 
parture, in  some  degree  at  least  serene,  hope- 
ful, assured.  It  was  to  be  some  years  still 
before  he  could  profit  very  tangibly  from 
Whitman's  message,  but  for  the  moment  it 
brought  him  through  a  dark  passage  and 
proved  an  antidote  that  cleared  him  forever  of 
Jowett's  power. 

To  Jowett  he  had  written  about  this  time, 
begging  his  advice  in  the  choice  of  a  vocation 
and  stating  his  belief  that  although  the  literary 
life  was  and  had  always  been  his  main  desire 
he  realized  that  his  bent  was  neither  for  the 
purely  artistic  nor  the  purely  philosophic  in 
letters.  "The  point  seems  to  have  been 
reached,"  he  wrote,  "at  which  I  must  definitely 
renounce  writing,  or  make  it  the  sole  business 


68    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

of  my  life."  Jowett  replied,  asking  him  to 
run  down  and  have  a  talk  with  him  at  Oxford. 
The  Master  was  cautiously  encouraging.  He 
had  already  expressed  his  opinion  that  Sy- 
monds  had  it  in  him  to  become  eminent  in  liter- 
ature. Now  he  added  makeweights  to  that 
opinion,  urging  him  to  finish  his  legal  studies 
and  get  called  to  the  Bar,  to  keep  his  eye  on 
politics  as  a  solid  possibility  to  fall  back  upon 
and  to  translate Zeller's  history  of  Aristotelian- 
ism.  I  cannot  help  adding  that,  when  during 
the  conversation  the  question  of  de  Musset's 
tragic  career  came  up,  Jowett's  comment  was : 
''Men  should  keep  their  minds  to  duty."  The 
whole  abyss  of  Jowett's  ineptitude  lies  in  that 
sentence  and  that  context.  And  I  may  here 
anticipate  a  little  the  fortunes  of  Zeller's  Aris- 
totelianism.  In  a  Symonds  letter  of  1867  oc- 
curs the  sentence:  "Zeller,  that  paradox  of  my 
unequal  existence,  keeps  on  his  caterpillar  pace 
from  day  to  day.  The  slow  muddy  river  of 
translated  speech  indeed  stagnates  now  and 
then,  forming  into  noisome  pools  and  eddying 
in  slime  about  perplexing  boulders.  Yet  volu- 
minously thick  it  oozes  on."  And  again  at  a 


YOUTH:    WANDERINGS        69 

later  point,  in  the  Autobiography :  "Much  time 
was  wasted  upon  a  translation  of  Zeller's  his- 
tory of  Aristotle  and  the  Aristotelian  school. 
This  I  undertook  at  Jowett's  suggestion.  Jow- 
ett,  I  may  say  in  passing,  had  a  singular  way 
of  setting  his  friends  to  do  work  undoubtedly 
useful,  but  for  which  they  are  not  suited.  To 
make  me  translate  Zeller,  instead  of  Cellini 
or  Boccaccio,  was  nothing  short  of  a  gaucherie. 
I  found  it  intolerably  irksome.  I  did  it  abom- 
inably ill.  It  retarded  the  recovery  of  my  eye- 
sight, and  when  it  was  done  I  abandoned  it  as 
worthless."  I  pursue  the  development  of  this 
little  episode  because  it  illustrates  the  Master's 
more  than  venial  failure  as  regards  the  pupil, 
the  pupil's  dogged  devotion  to  the  Master's 
will,  and  most  important  of  all  the  pupil's  final 
sense  of  liberation  from  that  will. 

For  Jowett's  advice,  accepted  as  to  Zeller, 
was  negligible  in  the  main.  Symonds  was  rap- 
idly determining  his  own  future.  With  his 
wife  he  was  reading  works  on  Michael  Angelo 
and  the  Renaissance — "I  want  to  keep  my 
mind  on  that  part  of  European  history," 
he  wrote  in  a  letter.  Visiting  Clifton 


70    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

in  August  he  found  Woolner  the  sculptor 
making  a  bust  of  his  father.  Woolner 
with  his  clear  vocation,  his  vigor  and  single- 
mindedness  in  art,  impressed  him  deeply, 
just  as  Jenny  Lind  had  formerly  done. 
"Woolner,"  he  noted  in  his  diary,  "likes 
people  to  keep  to  their  trade  and  not  to  med- 
dle. He  has  a  profound  contempt  for  Jow- 
ett's  meddling  criticism."  The  gulf  dividing 
artistic  sensibility  from  artistic  power  occu- 
pied his  mind,  but  not  quite  with  the  old  feel- 
ing of  impotence.  Woolner,  the  stout-fibred 
and  opinionated  sculptor,  could  yet  compass 
the  miracle  of  art ;  and  after  hearing  Israel  in 
Egypt  he  ponders  on  such  a  man  as  Handel, 
greedy,  coarse  and  garrulous  in  conversation, 
according  to  his  biographer,  fond  of  beer, 
without  passions  and  without  one  intellectual 
taste,  who  could  yet  "express  the  feelings  of 
mighty  nations,  and  speak  with  the  voice  of 
angels  more  effectually  than  even  Milton." 
Symonds,  we  may  note,  had  the  characteristic 
Knglish  enthusiasm  for  Handel.  Throughout 
this  period  his  diaries  are  filled  with  specula- 


YOUTH:    WANDERINGS         71 

tions  on  the  nature  of  artists:  one  can  see  al- 
ready that  he  was  a  born  biographer. 

Speculations  of  this  kind  led  him  to  the  con- 
clusion that  he  was  not,  and  could  not  become, 
an  originating  artist  himself.  We  find  him 
noting,  on  November  30,  1865,  an  important 
date  in  relation  to  his  ultimate  career,  his  in- 
tention to  fit  himself  "for  being  a  good  vul- 
gariseur"  The  one  trait  he  could  depend  upon 
was  irrepressible  energy,  a  kind  of  energy 
which  filled  up  every  hour  left  vacant  by 
bodily  ailment,  weak  eyes  and  treacherous 
brain, — even  those  perhaps  which  might  better 
have  been  filled  with  passive  reflection.  If  he 
could  not  be  a  poet  he  could  at  least  set  him- 
self, by  industrious,  persistent,  effectual  work, 
to  learn  the  craft  of  letters.  He  could  let  the 
muses  shift  for  themselves.  And  indeed  for 
Symonds  this  determination,  baffled  as  it  was 
for  some  time  to  be,  was  highly  essential.  The 
mere  semi-physical  exercise  of  putting  to- 
gether words  and  sentences  was  needed  by  him 
as  a  tonic,  and  to  his  dogged  perseverance  in 
this,  often  against  medical  orders,  he  attrib- 
uted his  prolonged  life. 


72    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

But  now,  when  he  had  taken  his  resolve,  a 
fresh  disaster  befell.  His  father,  examining 
him  on  Christmas  eve,  discovered  that  the  apex 
of  the  left  lung  was  gravely  affected.  By 
the  strange  displacement  of  energy  which 
often  occurs  in  tubercular  cases,  the  new 
trouble  no  sooner  asserted  itself  than  the  old 
brain-weakness  began  to  abate.  The  fresh 
evil,  so  much  more  serious  as  regards  his  out- 
ward life,  enabled  him  to  live  more  intensely 
and  more  successfully  within.  He  became 
definitely  happier  and  more  capable  of  pro- 
longed study.  But  this  again  was  a  new  main 
tendency  which  did  not  for  some  time  exhibit 
noticeable  results. 

On  February  24, 186G,  he  set  out  for  the  Ri- 
viera. At  Mentone  he  set  seriously  to  work 
mastering  Italian,  of  which  he  had  had  since 
Harrow  days  only  a  convenient  knowledge, 
pressing  through  Dante,  Boccaccio,  and  Ari- 
osto,  writing  the  first  of  his  Greek  studies — 
that  on  Empedocles,  struggling  to  purge  his 
style  of  purple  patches  and  to  grasp  more  in- 
cisively the  truth  about  men,  works,  places.  A 
stay  in  Switzerland  on  the  way  home  brought 


YOUTH:    WANDERINGS        73 

back  all  his  old  dreams  of  poetry.  He  was 
growing  more  rapidly  than  he  knew,  but  the 
growth  was  leading  him  inexorably  away  from 
what  he  chiefly  longed  for.  In  August  he  re- 
turned with  his  wife  to  47,  Norfolk  Square, 
where  ten  months  before  his  eldest  daughter 
Janet  had  been  born.  His  complex  and  scat- 
tered sympathies  were  gradually  shaking  down 
to  a  more  settled  programme;  and  it  already 
appeared  how  much  of  that  programme  was 
to  be  occupied  with  the  Renaissance  and  its  re- 
lations. With  Jowett,  on  a  flying  visit  to  Ox- 
ford, we  find  him  considering  the  idea  of  a 
History  of  the  Renaissance  in  England,  which 
he  never  relinquished  and  to  which  he  contrib- 
uted in  his  dramatic  studies  and  his  lives  of 
Sidney  and  Jonson. 

Another  journey  through  France,  made 
necessary  by  an  attack  of  pneumonia  and  ag- 
gravated brain-congestion,  followed  at  the  end 
of  May,  1867.  His  journal  at  this  time  is  ex- 
ceptionally full  and  illuminating:  his  varied 
sympathies  begin  to  assume  forms  character- 
istic of  his  later  complex  though  reasonably 
coherent  point  of  view.  He  longs  continually 


74    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

for  the  Alps,  obscurely  divining  that  among 
them  he  would  eventually  find  health  and 
strength.  At  Bayeux  he  finds,  in  the  midst  of 
his  architectural  studies,  that  there  is  a  greater 
monotony  among  cathedrals  than  among 
mountains,  and  he  adds  significantly,  "Nature 
increases,  art  diminishes,  as  we  grow  older." 
Passing  strangers — the  theme  of  more  than 
one  of  his  published  poems — haunt  him  with 
the  mysterious  fascination  of  unknown  and  un- 
knowable destinies.  "I  hate  the  sophistication 
of  my  existence,"  he  writes,  "the  being  penned 
up  in  a  cage  of  archaeology  and  literary  pic- 
ture-making." He  is  tormented  with  a  sense 
of  idleness  and  wasted  youth :  the  need  of  con- 
stant reaction,  activity,  recording  of  impres- 
sions grows  upon  him.  He  pours  himself  out 
in  letters,  in  diaries,  notes,  essays,  poems.  Ev- 
erything that  enters  his  brain  tortures  him  un- 
til it  is  recast  and  thrown  forth  again.  He 
seems  to  repeat  feverishly  over  and  over  those 
appalling  words  of  Marvell: 

"And  ever  at  my  back  I  hear 
Time's  winged  chariot  hurrying  near." 


YOUTH:    WANDERINGS         75 

A  morbid  fear  of  stopping,  waiting,  letting  go 
possesses  him.  He  cannot  content  himself  that 
life,  trusted  a  little,  in  its  own  mysterious, 
blundering,  compulsive  way,  fulfils  itself  after 
a  fashion  which  is  from  the  beginning,  in  each 
case,  inevitable.  No  disciple  of  Goethe  was 
ever  more  fitted  to  profit  by  Goethe's  paradox, 
Was  man  in  der  Jugend  begehrt  hat  man  im 
Alter  die  Fulle;  that  the  life  committed  to  na- 
ture works  itself  out  mechanically,  while  the 
individual  in  becoming  as  disinterested  as  na- 
ture views  himself  with  all  the  cold  indifference 
of  nature,  passing  through  his  seasons  inexor- 
ably as  the  year  and  indestructibly  as  the  wind : 
and  takes  a  kind  of  artistic  delight  in  the  in- 
evitableness  of  nature's  fulfilment  of  him. 
Some  such  faith  as  this — the  really  scientific 
morale,  so  vitally  needful,  was  beginning  to 
take  form  in  him,  fluctuating,  vague,  unac- 
countable, but  of  ever-increasing  strength. 
"No  one  is  happy,"  he  says,  "who  has  not  a 
deep,  firm  faith  in  some  ideal  far  beyond  this 
world,  in  some  law  of  majesty,  beauty,  good- 
ness, harmony,  superior  to  the  apparent  mean- 
ness, ugliness,  evil  discord  of  the  present 


76    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

dispensation.  .  .  .  Those  who  are  not  'ten- 
oned and  mortised'  upon  something  inde- 
structible must  be  rendered  wretched  by  the 
changefulness  and  barrenness  of  daily  life." 
Doubt  and  faith,  agitation  and  calm,  intel- 
lect and  emotion  were  struggling  to  gain  the 
mastery:  and  the  struggle  was  to  continue  un- 
til it  reached  its  culmination  in  the  great  crisis 
so  soon  to  follow. 

After  this  exhausting  fortnight  he  returned 
to  Hastings  and  London,  where  presently  an- 
other daughter  was  born.  The  summer  weeks 
were  still  more  exhausting;  brightened,  how- 
ever, by  the  close  friendship  he  now  formed 
with  Henry  Sidgwick.  His  diary  and  letters 
become  extravagantly  rhetorical  and  incoher- 
ent, though  often  acutely  and  awfully  vivid. 
How  truly  the  virus  of  Amiel  had  poisoned 
his  heart  may  be  seen  from  one  passage:  "I 
seem  to  enter  into  a  kind  of  Nirvana,  thinking 
of  mutability  and  youth  that  flows  away— 
until  the  senses  slip  off  one  by  one,  and 
thoughts  slumber,  and  the  conscious  soul  at 
last  stands  naked  and  alone,  environed  by 
eternal  silence  and  everlasting  nothingness.  It 


YOUTH:    WANDERINGS        77 

is  the  glacial  region  of  the  soul,  the  death  of 
all  that  warms  or  makes  to  move,  the  absolute 
indifference  to  pain  or  pleasure,  of  what  is  or 
what  is  not.  From  it  I  bring  no  message — 
none  at  least  that  can  be  said  in  words — but 
such  a  message  as  makes  one  feel  what  are  the 
solitudes  of  the  womb  and  of  the  grave.  No 
doubt  this  state  is — of  the  nerves — morbid ;  but 
what  does  it  not  reveal  to  me  of  the  uncolored, 
universal  I?" 

Symonds  was  now  passing  through  the  bit- 
terest, blackest  season  of  his  life.  The  maladie 
de  ridealj  the  demon  of  speculation,  the  thirst 
for  the  absolute  had  to  play  itself  out  before 
it  was  possible  for  him  to  strike  the  C-major 
of  this  life,  before  the  invigorating  earthiness 
of  Whitman  and  the  soothing  calm  of  Goethe 
could  prevail  with  him. 

The  crisis  came  during  a  second  tour  in 
France,  whither  he  had  repaired  with  his  family 
at  the  opening  of  September.  At  Melun  dur- 
ing a  sleepless  night  he  wrote  the  most  im- 
passioned of  his  poems,  An  Improvisation  on 
the  Violin.  It  is  a  dramatic  monologue,  the 
soliloquy  of  Beethoven  during  the  performance 


78    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

of  what  appears  to  be  the  C-minor  symphony 
or  an  improvisation  based  upon  it.  "The  vic- 
tory and  majesty  of  the  soul  are  wrought  out 
of  its  defeats  and  humiliations,"  he  had  writ- 
ten of  this  symphony  only  two  weeks  before. 
And  in  the  poem  and  this  context  is  exhibited 
the  intensely  personal  and  subjective  nature  of 
his  attitude  toward  music,  toward  all  the  arts 
indeed.  Nothing  could  illustrate  more  accu- 
rately his  incapacity  as  yet  for  rational  criti- 
cism. It  seems  to  substantiate  the  theory  that 
artistic  expression  literally  springs  from  dis- 
ease— a  kind  of  blood-letting,  as  Goethe  con- 
ceived it.  For  Symonds  perpetually  speaks  of 
the  relief  he  finds  in  writing  out  his  miseries  on 
paper.  He  clings  to  his  pen  as  a  shipwrecked 
man  clings  to  a  spar. 

On  October  24  he  arrived  at  Cannes.  There 
were  assembled  some  of  his  most  brilliant 
friends,  among  them  Jenny  Lind,  Henry 
Sidgwick,  and  Edward  Lear,  author  of  the 
Book  of  Nonsense.  Lear  was  busily  occupied, 
at  this  ironical  moment,  making  rhymes  and 
pictures  with  little  Janet  Symonds;  among 
them  the  immortal  Old  and  the  Pussycat  who 


YOUTH:    WANDERINGS         79 

went  to  sea  in  a  beautiful  pea-green  boat. 
Neuralgia,  worn-out  nerves,  increased  lung- 
disturbances,  shattered  eyesight,  digestive  dis- 
order, and  a  sprained  ankle  made  such  consola- 
tions ludicrously  impossible  to  Symonds.  His 
difficulties  suddenly  came  to  a  head  and  he 
passed  through  a  kind  of  insanity.  "All  the 
evil  humors  which  were  fermenting  in  my 
petty  state  of  man,"  he  says  in  his  Auto- 
biography',  "poignant  and  depressing  memories 
of  past  troubles,  physical  maladies  of  nerve- 
substance  and  lung-tissue,  decompositions  of 
habitual  creeds,  sentimental  vapors,  doubts 
about  the  existence  of  a  moral  basis  to  human 
life,  thwarted  intellectual  activity,  ambitions 
rudely  checked  by  impotence — all  these  miser- 
able factors  of  a  wretched  inner  life,  masked 
by  appearances,  the  worse  for  me  for  being 
treated  by  the  outside  world  as  mere  accidents 
of  illness  in  a  well-to-do  and  idle  citizen,  boiled 
up  in  a  kind  of  devil's  caldron  during  those 
last  weeks  at  Cannes  and  made  existence  hell." 
And  again:  "The  last  night  I  spent  at  Cannes 
was  the  worst  of  my  whole  life.  I  lay  awake 
motionless,  my  soul  stagnant,  feeling  what  is 


80    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

meant  by  spiritual  blackness  and  darkness.  If 
it  should  last  forever?  As  I  lay,  a  tightening 
approached  my  heart.  It  came  nearer,  the 
grasp  grew  firmer,  I  was  cold  and  lifeless  in 
the  clutch  of  a  great  agony."  Such  without 
doubt  is  the  state  that  in  sensational  natures 
precedes  "conversion." 

Inscrutable  and  intangible  as  this  crisis  may 
appear,  its  intense  reality  is  made  plain  by  its 
very  tangible  effect  upon  his  life  from  this 
time  forward.  Nothing  more  surely  proves 
how  really  fortunate  a  man  Symonds  was  than 
that  he  was  capable  of  this  purging  crisis. 
Many  men  have  lived — Amiel  their  chief  ex- 
emplar— nursing  the  maladies  that  afflicted 
Symonds,  standing,  as  Hegel  says  of  the 
modern  artist,  in  the  midst  of  this  reflecting 
world  and  its  relations  and  unable  by  any  act 
of  will  to  withdraw  from  it.  The  dim  and 
voiceless  pain  of  the  overcultivated  mind  which 
has  lost  its  power  of  self-command  creates  a 
special  limbo  of  lost  souls.  To  the  mind  which 
has  identified  itself  with  Maya,  which  has  ac- 
customed itself  to  the  universal  reality, 
phenomena  possess  only  a  wraithlike  existence, 


YOUTH:    WANDERINGS         81 

men  and  women  are  shadows  projected  on  a 
mist.  .Yet  life  with  all  its  passions  remains, 
life  which  has  lost  its  faculty  of  katharsis, 
which  cannot  purge  itself  through  action, 
which  cannot  satisfy  its  own  fundamental  de- 
mands, which  is  dead  without  being  disem- 
bodied. This  is  what  occurs  when,  in  psycho- 
logical language,  the  motor  activity  has  been 
wholly  supplanted  by  the  sensory,  when  the 
will  has  been  fretted  away  by  the  imagination. 
This  tendency  in  Symonds  was  brought  up 
sharply.  All  the  unhealthy,  unguided,  chaotic 
stirrings  of  his  youth  could  not  prevail  finally 
against  his  truly  amazing  power  of  rebound. 
His  original  faculty  for  pure  artistic  creation, 
as  I  see  it,  had  been  very  early  swamped. 
Three  things  had  caused  this:  his  lack  of  the 
sheer  physical  power  of  self-assertion,  the 
aesthetic  studies  which  had  dissipated  it  and 
diluted  it  with  speculation,  and  the  obtuse  com- 
punction-philosophy of  his  father  and  Jowett. 
All  these  combined,  acting  either  as  positive 
or  negative  agencies,  had  turned  him  from  art 
into  a?sthetics.  The  speculative  element  of 
aesthetics  had  gradually  pursued  its  course, 


draining  the  imagination,  the  nerves,  the  will 
until  it  had  reached  its  logical  climax  and  put 
the  last  question  to  life.  To  this  question  there 
is  no  intellectual  reply.  Life  itself  can  reply 
by  continuing  to  roll  on.  The  soul  can  reply 
by  submitting  blindly  or  enthusiastically  to 
life.  But  for  a  few  weeks  it  seemed  to  Sy- 
monds  that  he  lacked  the  power  of  submission 
to  life — because  the  springs  of  his  own  life 
•were  sapped.  He  had  become  for  the  moment 
pure  intellect,  and  intellect  had  reached  its 
barrier.  Nerves  and  emotions  appeared  to  be 
in  abeyance.  In  reality  they  were  in  a  state 
of  hideous  tension  and,  being  so,  he  felt  all  the 
agony  of  the  position  which  he  seemed  only  to 
know.  It  was,  however,  impossible  for  Sy- 
monds  to  lose  his  mind.  He  possessed  very 
deep  and  strong  recuperative  powers  whose  ex- 
istence he  had  never  guessed,  and  these  pres- 
ently asserted  themselves.  It  became  quickly 
evident  how  much  wiser  nature  is  than  the 
doubting  brain.  The  total  man  surmounted 
the  erring  part — quietly,  without  warning. 
And  Symonds  was  no  sooner  on  his  feet  again 
than  he  found  himself  in  possession  of  some- 


YOUTH:    WANDERINGS        83 

thing  he  had  never  possessed  before — faith  in 
life.  The  sceptical,  the  speculative,  the 
analytical  mind  never  left  him,  but  it  was  never 
again  to  interfere  with  a  robust  sense  of  life 
in  its  totality,  life  which  is  more  than  cerebra- 
tion— faith  in  the  universe,  in  humanity,  and 
in  himself.  "I  emerged  at  last,"  he  says,  "into 
stoical  acceptance  of  my  place  in  the  world, 
combined  with  epicurean  indulgence.  To- 
gether, these  two  motives  restored  me  to  com- 
parative health,  gave  me  religion,  and  enabled 
me,  in  spite  of  broken  nerves  and  diseased 
lungs,  to  do  what  I  have  done  in  literature. 
I  am  certain  of  this  fact,  and  I  regard  the  utter 
blackness  of  despair  at  Cannes  as  the  midnight 
in  which  there  lay  a  budding  spiritual  mor- 
row." 

His  life  was  like  a  book  broken  in  the  back, 
which  falls  into  two  parts. 


CHAPTER  IV, 
AT  CLIFTON:    LITERATURE 

IN  the  very  midst  of  his  ordeal  at  Cannes 
Symonds  did  not  hesitate  in  his  studies. 
We  find  him  reading  Richardson,  Balzac,  and 
Heine's  letters,  plodding  on  with  Zeller,  and 
projecting  a  sort  of  original  version  of  Hegel's 
^Esthetics.  The  journey  proceeded  through 
Corsica  and  Italy  where  Symonds,  busy  and 
curious  with  renewed  energy  and  life,  resumed 
the  study  of  Italian  and  wrote  his  essays  on 
Aristophanes,  Ariosto  and  Tasso.  In  Novem- 
ber he  took  his  family  to  Clifton,  engaging  a 
house  quite  near  his  old  home,  where  on  Jan- 
uary 15,  18G9,  his  daughter  Margaret  was 
born. 

Symonds  was  now  eager  for  action,  and  for 
a  time  his  activity  took  a  social  form.  Clifton 
College  had  recently  been  founded,  largely 
through  the  instrumentality  of  his  father,  and 

84 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE      85 

he  arranged  presently  to  give  lectures  on 
Greek  Literature  to  the  Sixth  Form,  which 
he  extended  also  to  ladies'  classes  in  Bristol. 
This  work  I  fancy  was  of  great  importance 
to  his  chosen  career  of  vulgariseur.  For  the 
first  time  he  learned  the  demands  of  an 
audience — the  kind  of  audience  to  which,  per- 
haps against  his  dearest  wishes,  the  greatest 
part  of  his  writings  have  appealed  and  will 
appeal.  For  it  must  be  remembered  that  this 
well-known  apostle  of  culture  to  the  majority 
mistrusted  and  disliked  all  the  sentimentalities 
of  culture,  such  as  are  not  truly  acclimated 
to  the  natural  self.  However,  he  was  now 
required  to  find  his  level.  Desultory,  frag- 
mentary, agitated  piece-work  was  no  longer  in 
the  old  way  possible.  He  was  forced  to  study 
the  art  of  presentation  and  to  get  his  material 
into  shape.  That  the  answering  pull,  the  con- 
crete presence  of  listeners  was  exhilarating  to 
him  is  evident  from  the  fact  that  his  first  books 
were  the  direct  outcome  of  these  lectures. 
Whether,  as  he  maintained,  he  lacked  the  art 
of  lecturing  or  not,  it  is  significant  that  he 
wrote  in  a  letter  of  this  time:  "My  emotions 


86    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

are  less  occupied  and  my  imagination  more 
exercised."  The  introspective  habit  was  rapidly 
falling  away,  and  he  was  consequently  giving 
himself  more  generously  to  life.  Some  of  his 
pupils  have  recorded  the  profound  influence 
upon  them  of  his  great  power  in  dialectics,  his 
own  tenacity  of  aim,  and  his  wonderful  sym- 
pathy with  young  men.  He  lectured  once  a 
week  at  the  college,  continuing  the  work  talk- 
ing and  reading  aloud  in  his  own  library. 
"Getsubjects  outside^yourself,  he  used  to  say, 
i  f  }^ou  wish  to  show^  that  you  are  strong ;,  and 
if  you  intend  to  be  a  poet,  you  must  begin 
and  end  withjstrength.7r  So  writes  one  pupil 
in  a  memorial  notice  of  1893.  It  exhibits 
pathetically  the  eagerness  with  which  Symonds 
was  himself  endeavoring  to  get  outside  him- 
self and  to  find  strength.  He  was  rapidly 
assuming  the  position  of  public  responsibility 
which  later  became  him  so  well  at  Davos.  All 
this  fell  in  with  the  scheme  his  father  had 
formed  for  him,  with  so  many  affectionate, 
mistaken,  postponed  hopes.  And  now  that 
kindly,  repressive  influence  was  to  be  removed. 
On  February  25,  1871,  Dr.  Svmonds  died. 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE      87 

His  father's  death  was  a  profound  shock; 
yet  Symonds  almost  immediately  realized,  with 
chagrin,  how  liberating  a  shock  it  was.  It 
came  at  the  moment  when  he  had  at  last  pre- 
pared himself  for  work,  and  it  enabled  him 
to  carry  out  that  work  in  his  own  way.  "It 
is  true,"  he  says  in  his  Autobiography,  "that 
the  independence  I  now  acquired  added  a  de- 
cided stimulus  to  my  mental  growth.  My 
father  had  been  so  revered  and  so  implicitly 
obeyed  by  me  that  his  strong  personal  influence 
kept  me  in  something  like  childish  subjection. 
I  did  nothing  without  consulting  him,  and 
when  I  was  unable  to  repress  those  parts  of 
my  nature  with  which  he  could  not  sympathize, 
I  resorted  to  subterfuge,  half -measures,  and 
concealments.  Left  without  him,  I  had  to  act 
for  myself,  and  insensibly  I  became  more 
manly."  And  again,  "I  doubt  whether  I 
could  have  written  as  freely,  and  published  as 
spontaneously,  as  I  have  done,  had  I  been  con- 
scious of  his  criticism."  Pietas  was  the  one 
strictly  Roman  virtue  that  Symonds  pos- 
sessed. It  is  a  virtue  which,  in  some  condi- 
tions, becomes  the  mother  of  many  vices. 


88    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

With  his  wife  and  three  daughters  he  now 
moved  into  his  boyhood  home,  Clifton  Hill 
House,  and  presently  began  to  assume  his 
father's  place  in  the  responsibilities  of  the 
town.  He  was  elected  to  the  Clifton  College 
Council,  served  as  secretary  to  an  Invalid 
Ladies'  Home,  and  was  one  of  the  founders 
of  Bristol  University.  He  gathered  together 
a  volume  of  Miscellanies  by  Dr.  Symonds  and 
edited  the  Remains  of  Conington,  who  had 
also  died.  In  1872  he  published  his  first  book, 
An  Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Dante.  This 
was  prepared  from  lectures  given  at  Clifton 
College  and  in  Exeter :  it  forms  an  appropriate 
opening  to  the  long  series  of  his  publications 
dealing  with  the  Renaissance. 

The  idea  of  a  monumental  work  on  that  sub- 
ject had  been  brewing  since  the  latter  part  of 
1870.  His  friend  Frederic  Myers,  with  whom 
he  had  first  read  Whitman,  had  proposed  a 
collaboration,  which  fell  through;  and  Sy- 
monds, doubtful  and  hesitant,  determined  to 
proceed  alone.  "My  heart  bleeds,"  he  wrote, 
"to  think  of  my  own  incapacity  for  a  great 
work.  I  must  not  think  of  it,  for  the  thought 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE      89 

paralyzes."  Nevertheless,  in  February,  1871, 
the  month  of  his  father's  death,  we  find  him 
furiously  at  work  upon  the  first  chapter,  a 
rapid  survey  of  the  whole  of  Italian  life  and 
history  before  Dante.  This  chapter  seems  to 
be  the  second  and  a  part  of  the  first  in  the 
volume  called  The  Age  of  the  Despots.  Other 
trains  of  thought  were  also  taking  form.  A 
long  series  of  articles  had  been  passing 
through  the  magazines:  those  on  Ravenna, 
Orvieto,  Christmas  in  Rome.,  Ajaccio,  and 
many  others,  rewritten  from  his  journals  of 
travel ;  as  well  as  Greek  studies  on  The  Gnomic 
Poets,  Empedocles,  The  Idyllists,  etc.,  some 
of  which  had  been  given  as  lectures  at  Clifton 
College.  These  appeared  presently  in  book 
form,  Studies  of  the  Greek  Poets  in  1873  and 
Sketches  in  Italy  and  Greece  in  1874.  And 
at  about  this  time  John  Morley,  much  taken 
with  his  Greek  studies,  invited  him  to  form 
a  connection  as  regular  contributor  to  The 
Fortnightly  Review,  which  he  maintained  dur- 
ing the  rest  of  his  life. 

To  support  his  health  and  restrain  him  from 
excessive  study  the  Continental  tours  continued 


90    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

regularly.  In  1872  he  was  again  in  Switzer- 
land, and  in  the  spring  of  1873  he  went  with 
his  wife  to  Greece.  Athens,  he  notes,  "is  pure 
light";  and  his  essay  on  Athens  became  an 
elaboration  of  this  phrase.  Later  in  the  same 
year  he  visited  Malta,  Tunis,  Sicily,  and  Italy 
again,  busily  collecting  material  for  his  great 
work.  "I  read  chronicles  and  histories  and 
biographies  on  the  very  spot  where  the  events 
happened,  and  make  notes  for  future  use 
which  have  the  juice  of  life  in  them." 

In  1875  the  first  volume  of  The  Renaissance 
in  Italy  appeared,  dealing  with  the  socio- 
political aspect  of  the  period.  In  his  Auto- 
biography Symonds  deplores  the  declamatory 
tone  which  obstinately  remained  in  the  book 
after  it  was  rewritten  from  his  lectures.  He 
doubts  whether  he  could  ever  have  launched 
his  treacherous  brain  on  so  huge  an  enterprise 
had  he  not  taken  the  first  step  by  lecturing. 
Walter  Pater,  reviewing  this  first  volume  in 
The  Academy,  wrote:  "The  book  presents  a 
brilliant  picture  of  its  subject.  .  .  .  As 
is  the  writer's  subject  so  is  his  style — energetic, 
flexible,  eloquent,  full  of  various  illustrations, 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE      91 

keeping  the  attention  of  the  reader  always  on 
the  alert.  .  .  .  The  imagination  in  his- 
torical composition  works  most  legitimately 
when  it  approaches  dramatic  effects.  In  this 
volume  there  is  a  high  degree  of  the  dramatic ; 
here  all  is  objective,  and  the  writer  is  hardly 
seen  behind  his  work."  To  this  hearty  praise 
he  adds  one  significant  qualification — the  ab- 
sence of  reserve:  "I  note  the  absence  of  this 
reserve  in  many  turns  of  expression,  in  the 
choice  sometimes  of  detail  and  metaphor." 

Between  Symonds  and  Pater,  I  may  men- 
tion at  this  point,  there  was  a  strange  want 
of  sympathy.  Pater  habitually  referred  with 
a  kind  of  pitying  contempt  to  his  fellow- 
Platonist  as  "poor  Symonds."  Symonds, 
writing  in  1885  of  Marius,  shrinks  from 
"approaching  Pater's  style,  which  has  a  pe- 
culiarly disagreeable  effect  upon  my  nerves — 
like  the  presence  of  a  civet-cat" ;  and  again,  in 
1890,  "I  tried  Pater's  Appreciations  to-day, 
and  found  myself  wandering  about  among  the 
'precious'  sentences,  just  as  though  I  had  lost 
myself  in  a  sugar-cane  plantation."  No  one, 
I  dare  say,  could  have  b^en  so  acute! y  annoyed 


by  Pater's  style  who  was  not  himself  on  the 
perilous  edge  of  preciosity.  This  was  indeed 
somewhat  the  case  with  Symonds,  who  was 
often  preserved  from  preciosity  only  by  the 
other  extreme  of  half  heedless  improvisation. 
It  is  a  little  sadly  notable  to  find  the  two  best 
contemporary  workers  in  a  field  so  largely 
identical,  so  irreconcilable  in  temperament. 
Perhaps  the  field  itself  was  to  blame.  At  any 
rate,  the  gods  of  material  progress  may  be 
amused  to  find  the  Greek  spirit  reincarnated 
so  incompatible  with  itself,  as  if  the  modern 
Hellenist  could  remain  himself  only  in  the 
midst  of  barbarians. 

As  with  Pater,  so  with  Swinburne.  Sy- 
monds invariably  wrote  of  Swinburne  with  the 
respect  proper  to  a  great  poet.  Of  BothwcJl 
he  said,  "I  do  not  think  anything  greater  has 
been  produced  in  our  age.  ...  It  seems 
to  me  the  most  virile  exercise  of  the  poetic 
power  in  combination  with  historic  accuracy 
that  our  literature  of  this  century  can  show." 
But  elsewhere  and  of  another  poem  he  adds, 
"He  does  not  attend  to  the  projection  of  his 
thought  enough,  but  splashes  it  out  as  if  lie 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE      93 

were  upsetting  a  bucket."  What  Swinburne 
thought  of  Symonds  may  be  gathered  from 
one  of  the  wickedest  and  most  unjust  of  all 
his  wicked  and  unjust  criticisms.  In  his  recol- 
lections of  Jowett  he  writes  of  "such  renascent 
blossoms  of  the  Italian  renascence  as  the 
Platonic  amorist  of  blue-breeched  gondoliers 
who  is  now  in  Aretino's  bosom.  The  cult  of 
the  Calamus,  as  expounded  by  Mr.  Addington 
Symonds  to  his  fellow-Calamites,  would  have 
found  no  acceptance  or  tolerance  with  the 
translator  of  Plato."  What  Jowett  really 
thought  of  Symonds  we  know  well.  Truly 
there  is  something  catlike  about  modern 
pagans. 

The  second  series  of  Studies  of  the  Greek 
Poets  followed  rapidly.  On  these  two  volumes, 
the  most  luxuriant  of  all  his  writings,  I  should 
like  to  pause.  "Some  will  always  be  found, 
under  the  conditions  of  this  double  culture," 
Symonds  had  said,  "to  whom  Greece  is  a  lost 
fatherland,  and  who,  passing  through  life  with 
the  mat  du  pays  of  that  irrecoverable  land  upon 
them,  may  be  compared  to  visionaries,  spend- 
ing their  nights  in  golden  dreams  and  the 


94    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

days  in  common  duties."  Only  a  man  like 
Symonds,  perplexed  by  a  thousand  cross-cur- 
rents of  thought,  thwarted  from  the  pure 
poetical  faculty,  could  feel  as  a  revelation  that 
majesty  of  the  early  philosophers,  that  fire  and 
sweetness  of  the  early  poets.  The  world  has 
squandered  since  their  day  genius  beyond 
measure;  but  they  remain,  immortal  names, 
pure  and  clear  as  drops  of  wine  embossing 
cups  of  crystal.  Why?  Because  they  are  the 
immemorial  prototypes,  the  inventors  of  all 
that  usage  and  slovenly  debasement  have 
brought  to  us  in  the  form  of  platitude.  They 
lived  when  platitude  was  young  and  the  dew 
of  early  morning  lay  shining  on  the  first  and 
simplest  thoughts  of  men.  They  discovered 
those  "happy  thoughts"  which  are  the  points 
of  departure  for  all  speculation.  It  is  hard 
for  us  to  conceive  the  day  when  the  idea  that 
"not-being  has  no  existence"  could,  in  itself 
alone,  fill  the  whole  life  of  a  philosopher,  when 
he  could  become  victorious  and  majestic 
through  the  discovery  of  it,  when  so  simple 
a  notion  could  buoy  up  a  man  of  gigantic 
intellectual  powers,  satisfy  him,  enable  him  to 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE      95 

look  back  upon  a  well-filled  and  exuberant  life 
and  bring  him,  as  it  brought  Parmenides,  the 
reverence  of  the  greatest  thinkers  of  his  world. 
That  is  why  the  simplicity  of  the  ancients  is 
so  hard  for  us  to  understand.  We  cannot 
grasp  how  pregnant  that  simplicity  was — we 
who  grasp  Goethe,  Dante,  and  Shakespeare 
and  even  then  feel  unsatisfied,  and  unex- 
pressed. Happy  is  the  man  who,  in  our  day, 
can  find  a  thought  larger  than  himself!  He 
alone  is  capable  of  moral  culture.  But  not 
among  the  early  philosophers  alone  do  we  find 
that  pregnant  simplicity  by  which  a  little 
thing  can  greatly  fulfil  a  life.  In  all  ages  of 
childhood  and  poetry  we  find  it — in  our  own 
Shakespearean  age  when  Gabriel  Harvey,  the 
Cambridge  scholar,  expressed  as  his  ultimate 
wish  to  have  it  written  upon  his  grave  that  he 
had  "fostered  hexameters  on  English  soil." 
No  scholar  could  have  had  less  of  the  sophisti- 
cation of  scholarship  than  is  there  expressed. 
In  reflections  like  these,  in  the  passion  of  op- 
posites,  we  find  the  true  nature  of  such  eclectic 
affinities  as  those  of  Symonds  with  the  Greeks 
and  the  Elizabethans. 


96    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

Symonds'  attitude  toward  scholarship  seems 
to  me  indicated  in  his  chapter  on  mythology. 
He  there  states  carefully  the  seven  main 
philological  explanations  of  the  origin  of 
myths,  and  parries  each  in  favor  of  a  vaguer 
explanation.  He  seems  to  feel  that  to  get  at 
the  true  origin  of  m^ths_onejhas  to  be  aj^oet. 
And  indeed  in  the  last  analysis  one  can  grasp 
such  a  thing  only  by  a  sympathetic  under- 
standing of  childhood;  so  that  the  method  of 
approach  becomes  rather  psychological  than 
philological.  Behind  all  study  there  lies  a 
mystery,  and  the  origins  of  things  can  be 
grasped  only  by  clairvoyance.  What  is  true 
of  the  origins  of  tilings  human  is  true  in  a 
similar  way  of  their  definitions.  One  may 
stumble  about  endlessly  among  scientific  defini- 
tions of  the  epic;  then  one  comes  upon  Shelley's 
definition  as  the  "summing-up  of  the  spiritual 
life  of  an  age  for  the  age  that  follows,"  and 
at  once  a  flood  of  light  falls  over  everything. 
Science  could  not  have  arrived  at  that  defini- 
tion. Why?  Because  it  is  only  suggestive 
and  personal,  not  abstract  and  final.  A  hun- 
dred poets  might  have  stated  it  in  as  many 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE       97 

different  ways  and  each  way  would  have  had 
a  higher  finality  in  it  than  exact  scholarship 
could  achieve.  Thisof  course  is  ^nly  to  say_ 
that  science  provides  a  method,  that  it  does  not 
pretend  to  penetrate  essences,  that  the  true 
truth  is  the  jpoet's.  There  are  two  kinds  of 
truth :  idealjtruth  and  practical  truth — truth 
toLJJjvination  and  truth  by  loffic,  and  both, 
alas!  are  mutually  scornful.  What  must  the 
logical  historian  think  of  Carlyle's  French 
Revolution?  And,  on  the  other  hand,  what 
would  Ruskin  have  said  of  the  art-criticism  of 
Mr.  Bernhard  Berenson?  That  is  the  ever- 
lasting dualism  between  the  prophet  of  an 
ideal  order  and  the  interpreter  of  the  fait 
accompli.  Symonds,  with  his  divided  heart,  is 
an  example  of  the  soul  astray  between_iiYO 
worlds.  His  scholarship  is  never  quite  of  the 
orthodox  kind.  It  is  restless  scholarship,  seek- 
ing always  to  do  what  only  poetry  can  do,  to 
become  poetry;  scholarship  not  merely  as  hu- 
manism but  as  mysticism.  I  do  not  wish  to 
emphasize  this  too  much — it  is  only  a  touch, 
which  does  not  seriously  vitiate  the  practical 
solidity  of  his  work.  But  it  is  the  kind  of 


98    JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

thing  which,  had  it  been  done  more  courage- 
ously, conclusively,  whole-heartedly,  would 
have  ruined  Symonds'  work  as  scientific  pre- 
sentation and  might  have  lifted  it  out  of  the 
scientific  class  altogether  into  the  region  of 
truly  poetical  interpretation.  That  perilous 
method  results  frequently  in  mere  unsound- 
ness  of  thought ;  occasionally  it  results  in  such 
work  as  Carlyle's  French  Revolution,  wherein 
the  lack  of  practical  truth  is  counterbalanced 
by  a  personality  that  makes  it  a  piece  of  high 
fantasy. 

In  the  Greek  Poets  I  think  Symonds  pro- 
duced something  more  like  a  work  of  genius 
than  he  ever  again  achieved.  The  book  is 
vibrant  with  golden  pictures  and  bright 
phrases,  such  as  this:  "The  sweetness  of  the 
songs  of  Phrynichus  has  reached  us  like  the 
echo  of  a  bird's  voice  in  a  traveller's  narrative." 
It  cannot  be  denied  that  the  style  is  often  over- 
studied  and  more  often  recklessly  overblown. 
But  who  that  loves  beauty  in  words  and  rebels 
against  our  too  unstudied  and  too  sable  English 
prose,  and  prose  of  scholarship  especially,  can 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE      99 

regret  a  passage  like  this  on  Sappho  and  her 
sister  poets  for  all  its  tricks  of  rhetoric? 

"All  the  luxuries  and  elegancies  of  life 
which  that  climate  and  the  rich  valleys  of 
Lesbos  could  afford  were  at  their  disposal ; 
exquisite  gardens,  where  the  rose  and  hyacinth 
spread  perfume;  river-beds  ablaze  with  the 
oleander  and  wild  pomegranate;  olive  groves 
and  fountains,  where  the  cyclamen  and  violet 
flowered  with  feathery  maiden-hair;  pine-tree- 
shadowed  coves,  where  they  might  bathe  in  the 
calm  of  a  tideless  sea;  fruits  such  as  only  the 
southern  sun  and  sea-wind  can  mature ;  marble 
cliffs,  starred  with  jonquil  and  anemone  in 
spring,  aromatic  with  myrtle  and  lentisk  and 
samphire  and  wild-rosemary  through  all  the 
months;  nightingales  that  sang  in  May;  tem- 
ples dim  with  dusky  gold  and  bright  with 
ivory;  statues  and  frescoes  of  heroic  forms. 
In  such  scenes  as  these  the  Lesbian  poets  lived, 
and  thought  of  love." 

Passages  like  this,  modulated  in  tone  and 
key  to  a  whole  pageant  world  of  scenes  and 
characters,  and  all  as  blossoms  of  severe  learn- 
ing, corroborate  Frederic  Harrison's  opinion 


100  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

that  "Symonds  was  certainly  far  more  widely 
and  profoundly  versed  in  Greek  poetry  than 
any  Englishman  who  in  our  day  has  analyzed 
it  for  the  general  reader.  And  it  is  plain  that 
no  scholar  of  his  eminence  has  been  master  of 
a  style  so  fascinating  and  eloquent." 

The  unending  journeys  back  and  forth  were 
making  of  the  fugitive  from  ill-health,  in 
spite  of  his  citizenlike  position  at  home,  a  kind 
of  scholar-gypsy.  The  second  volume  of  The 
Renaissance  feverishly  went  forward,  at  first 
in  Switzerland  and  then  for  some  months  of 
1876  at  San  Remo,  wherever  in  hotels  or 
casual  inns  a  writing-table  and  a  free  hour 
could  be  had.  "I  worked  furiously,  recklessly, 
at  this  period,"  he  writes,  "devouring  books 
upon  Italian  history,  art,  scholarship,  and 
literature,  writing  continually,  and  pushing 
one  volume  forward  while  another  was  going 
through  the  press."  The  travel  sketches  also 
proceeded  between  whiles,  filled  with  exquisite 
pages  of  color  and  scraps  of  history,  biog- 
raphy, criticism,  picturesque  word-painting. 

These  papers,  collected  finally  in  three 
volumes  which  now  bear  the  general  title 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE    101 

Sketches  and  Studies  in  Italy  and  Greece,  are 
so  many  chips  from  the  workshop  where  the 
weightier  books  were  being  laboriously  put  to- 
gether. They  bring  us  behind  the  scenes,  and 
show  us  the  anxious  travellings  to  and  fro  of 
the  quick-eyed  scholar  in  search  of  the  past. 
They  are  full  of  informal  autobiography,  and 
provide  for  us  the  ever-shifting,  kaleidoscopic 
background,  shimmering  and  iridescent,  of  his 
complex  outer  life.  They  are  Symonds' 
Reisebilder,  and  yet  with  a  very  significant 
difference  from  those  of  Heine.  F.  Harrison 
acutely  remarks  that  these  sketches  are  records 
of  things  seen  rather  than  of  things  felt.  That 
I  think  is  true,  and  Symonds  was  a  victim  of 
our  modern  passion  for  the  picturesque.  With 
all  his  intense  feeling  for  individual  men  and 
women,  his  passion  for  comradeship,  his  cos- 
mopolitan sympathies,  he  remains  always  a 
sublimated  tourist;  unlike  Heine  and  unlike 
Byron,  to  whom  ancient  monuments,  lovely 
scenes,  and  all  the  grandeur  of  the  past  exist 
primarily  as  stimulants  to  modern  liberty. 
Heine's  sketches  are  the  most  exquisite  that 
have  ever  been  written  about  Italy,  yet  Heine 


102  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

never  treats  any  phase  of  history  or  of  art 
as  an  end  in  itself.  Had  he  travelled  in  Italy 
in  the  days  when  Symonds  was  travelling  there 
we  feel  that  he  would  have  had  a  great  deal 
to  say  about  Mazzini  and  Garibaldi  and 
Cavour.  But  Symonds  never  once  that  I  can 
recall  appears  to  have  any  sense,  of  the  "Third 
Italy."  He  never  refers  to  Mazzini  except  in 
one  or  two  historical  passages  of  The  Renais- 
sance. Of  all  the  throbbing  modern  life  of 
the  nation,  social,  religious,  political,  of  all 
that  is  Italy,  he  is  almost  as  oblivious  as  the 
holiday  tripper.  The  very  years  during  which 
he  was  busily  passing  in  and  out  of  Italy, 
with  eager,  open  eyes,  were  the  years  of  Italy's 
greatest  crisis.  Yet  the  solitary  published 
reference  in  his  diary  to  any  sense  of  great 
occurrences  is  a  tell-tale  entry  of  1862.  He 
was  in  Milan,  and  the  people  had  been  stirred 
to  a  demonstration  against  the  Franco- 
Austrian  Government  by  a  speech  of  Gari- 
baldi. Four  hundred  were  taken  prisoners 
under  his  hotel  window;  nnd  he  observes,  "I 
often  wondered  what  a  demonstration  meant. 
This  is  a  pretty  and  picturesque  specimen." 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE    103 

This  amazing  sociological  insensibility  might 
be  consistent  in  an  artist;  in  a  historian  it  is, 
to  say  the  least,  singular.  And  it  is  all  the 
more  singular  when  we  recall  the  sympathy 
of  Symonds  with  historic  liberators  like 
Savonarola  and  Campanella.  Human  evolu- 
tion, the  liberation  of  men  was  indeed  an  ani- 
mating principle  of  his  entire  critical  and  re- 
ligious philosophy.  Are  we  forced  to  con- 
clude then  that  his  major  sympathies  were  in 
fact  purely  literary?  His  life  at  Davos  seems 
to  belie  that,  but  the  self-conscious  pursuit  of 
the  picturesque  is  perilous  to  the  most  genuine 
types  of  intellectual  integrity. 

Certainly  this  tourist  attitude  toward  Italy, 
as  a  kind  of  museum  filled  only  with  beautiful 
dead  things,  gives  a  false  perspective  even  to 
his  magnum  opus.  Professor  Villari  remarked 
that  he  seems  occasionally  to  forget  that  the 
Renaissance  was  only  a  single  period  of  Italian 
literature  and  art,  only  one  episode  in  a  long 
evolution  which  has  not  yet  worked  itself  out. 
He  follows  too  rashly  the  historical  method  of 
Taine  in  treating  the  traits  of  the  Italians  ex- 
hibited in  that  epoch  as  essential  and  perma- 


104  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

nent  rather  than  temporary  and  evolving. 
Even  Ruskin,  so  fundamentally  wanting  in 
sympathy  with  the  spirit  of  the  Renaissance, 
brings  to  it  a  truer  vision,  because  he  thinks 
of  it  always  as  an  episode — however  mistaken 
he  may  be  as  regards  the  quality  and  value 
of  that  episode — in  human  history.  Without 
doubt  Symonds  was  so  intensely  occupied  with 
the  golden  age  itself  that  he  neglected  some 
of  its  wider  aspects  and  ignored  the  modern 
Italy  with  which  it  has  so  vital  a  connection. 
The  truth  of  this  contention  will  be  evident, 
I  think,  to  anyone  who  reads  his  informal 
essays  in  their  proper  relation,  as  preliminary 
or  subsidiary  sketches  for  his  formal  work.  A 
historian  of  old  Italy  so  blind  to  young  Italy 
must  necessarily  be  wanting  somewhat  in  the 
truest  historical  vision.  For  here  the  Italian 
people  are  used  mainly  as  an  adjunct  to  the 
picturesque,  just  as  in  his  rather  deplorable 
essay  In  the  Key  of  Blue  (which  led  Swin- 
burne brutally  to  characterize  Symonds  as  the 
"Platonic  amorist  of  blue-breeched  gondo- 
liers") he  represents  his  gondolier  Antonio 
posed  in  various  lights  and  with  various  back- 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE    105 

grounds  to  bring  out  the  aspects  of  a  color. 
There  preeminently  we  have  the  record  of  a 
thing  seen  rather  than  of  a  thing  felt — the 
painter  is  at  work  rather  than  the  poet.  But 
no  one  can  read  his  Autobiography  without 
realizing  how  the  poet  was  struggling  in  him 
all  this  time  to  assert  itself.  It  is  one  of  the 
deepest  facts  of  his  pathological  condition  that 
he  could  never  summon  up  the  sufficient  vitality 
to  feel  what  he  saw,  to  be  the  poet  that  he 
wished  to  be.  He  seems  to  echo  the  words  of 
Coleridge,  in  his  Ode  to  Dejection: 

"I  see  them  all  so  excellently  fair, 
I  see,  not  feel,  how  beautiful  they  are !" 

And  again: 

"I  may  not  hope  from  outward  forms  to  win 
The  passion  and  the  life,  whose  fountains  are  within." 

Just  this  insufficient  vitality  gave  an  element 
of  truth  to  the  harsh  assertion  of  one  of  his 
reviewers,  that  his  poems  were  "the  vocabulary 
of  passion  served  up  cold."  Symonds  well 
knew  what  it  is  to  be  a  poet;  he  knew  the 
difference  between  pure  emotional  power  and 


the  nervous  power  he  possessed.  The  re- 
viewers of  his  poetry  rather  wantonly  told  the 
truth,  which  has  to  be  emphasized  about  his 
essays.  For  Symonds,  who  maintained  as  his 
first  principle  that  life  is  more  than  art,  failed 
here  in  the  application  of  it.  For  him  in  Italy 
life  is  wholly  submerged  beneath  art ;  with  the 
exception  of  the  people  of  Venice,  with  whom 
later  he  came  into  close,  friendly  contact,  his 
Italians  have  no  life  above  their  overwhelming 
past. 

Symonds  provides  so  bright  an  illustration 
of  that  morbid  passion  for  the  picturesque 
which  afflicted  the  world  at  the  close  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  that  I  feel  I  should  say 
more  of  it  here.  He  describes  the  impulse  in 
his  Autumn  Wanderings:  "Why  is  it  that 
Italian  beauty  does  not  leave  the  spirit  so  un- 
troubled as  an  Alpine  scene  ?  Why  do  we  here 
desire  the  flower  of  some  emergent  feeling  to 
grow  from  the  air,  or  from  the  soil,  or  from 
humanity  to  greet  us?  This  sense  of  want 
evoked  from  southern  beauty  is  perhaps  the 
antique  mythopoeic  yearning.  But  in  our  per- 
plexed life  it  takes  another  form,  and  seems 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE     107 

the  longing  for  emotion,  ever  fleeting,  ever 
new,  unrealized,  unreal,  insatiable."  This  pic- 
tures an  obscure,  iridescent  state  of  mind  which 
must  have  haunted  even  the  most  casual  tourist 
in  an  Italy  saturated  with  old  passions  that 
seem  struggling  to  revive  in  us  as  we  stand 
among  the  memorials  of  them.  We  cannot 
suppress  these  "echoes  of  an  antenatal  dream." 
In  places  where  life  has  been  lived  so  fully 
death  seems  to  lose  its  finality.  Numberless 
ghosts  beset  the  traveller  clamoring  to  regain 
their  old  life  in  his  life.  One  feels  oneself 
actually  a  cloud  of  many  witnesses,  a  composite 
of  some  phantom  horde.  One  becomes  the 
passive  agent  through  which  old  histories  re- 
enact  themselves — congregations  of  the  dead, 
jealous  of  our  trivial  flesh  and  blood,  struggle 
within  us  to  find  once  again  their  wonted 
space  and  time.  Symonds  in  one  of  his 
Venetian  sketches  describes  himself  as  trying 
at  the  Lido  to  focus  the  spirit  of  it,  when  sud- 
denly an  immense,  swarthy  swimmer  leaped 
from  the  sea,  like  an  incarnate  Triton.  There- 
upon he  observes:  "I  have  always  held  that 
in  our  modern  life  the  only  real  equivalent  for 


108   JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

the  antique  mythopoeic  sense- — that  sense  which 
enabled  the  Hellenic  race  to  figure  for  them- 
selves the  powers  of  earth  and  air  ... 
under  the  forms  of  living  human  beings,  is 
supplied  by  the  appearance  at  some  felicitous 
moment  of  a  man  or  woman  who  impersonates 
for  our  imagination  the  essence  of  the  beauty 
that  environs  us."  But  one  is  rarely  fortunate 
to  find  satisfaction  of  this  kind.  The  Circe  of 
travel  in  our  day  is  the  accumulation,  beyond 
our  own  power  of  recuperative  integrity,  of 
these  impressions  which  demand  an  embodi- 
ment they  cannot  have  except  in  creative 
imaginations.  Culture  provides  us  with  a 
sympathetic  knowledge  of  countless  historic 
lives  and  points  of  view,  which  only  robust 
personalities  can  subdue  to  themselves.  The 
peril  of  culture  lies  in  its  tendency  to  sap  one's 
own  firm  and  present  actuality,  and  vicarious 
experience  is  not  at  all  the  same  thing  as  real 
experience.  Symonds  felt  this,  and  he  ex- 
presses it  in  his  reflection:  "Passion,  nerve 
and  sinew,  eating  and  drinking,  even  money- 
getting,  the  coarsest  forms  of  activity,  come, 
in  my  reckoning,  before  culture." 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE    109 

The  Sketches  contain  some  of  his  most 
beautiful  writing,  and  I  may  not  pass  them 
by  without  giving  an  example  of  it.  One  must 
note,  however,  in  the  passage  I  have  chosen, 
a  certain  heaviness  of  effect  which  is  due  to 
a  characteristic  abuse  of  the  adjective  and  the 
want  of  a  certain  vigor  of  reserve  which  comes 
with  tranquil  recollection.  It  is  to  illustrate 
not  only  this,  but  Symonds'  perpetual  con- 
sciousness of  it,  his  own  consciousness  of  hav- 
ing passed  beyond  art,  the  alternate  swing  of 
his  pendulum  between  rhapsody  and  journal- 
ism, that  I  have  added  the  final  sentence  of 
qualification.  It  is  a  picture  of  Amalfi: 

"Over  the  whole  busy  scene  rise  the  gray 
hills,  soaring  into  blueness  of  air-distance, 
terreted  here  and  there  with  ruined  castles, 
capped  with  particolored  campanili  and  white 
convents,  and  tufted  through  their  whole 
height  with  the  orange  and  the  emerald  of  the 
great  tree-spurge,  and  with  the  live  gold  of  the 
blossoming  broom.  It  is  difficult  to  say  when 
this  picture  is  most  beautiful — whether  in  the 
early  morning,  when  the  boats  are  coming  back 
from  their  night-toil  upon  the  sea,  and  along 


110  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

the  headlands  in  the  fresh  light  lie  swathes  of 
fleecy  mist,  betokening  a  still,  hot  day — or  at 
noontide,  when  the  houses  on  the  hill  stand, 
tinted  pink  and  yellow,  shadowless  like  gems, 
and  the  great  caruba-trees  above  the  tangles 
of  vines  and  figs  are  blots  upon  the  steady 
glare — or  at  sunset,  when  violet  and  rose,  re- 
flected from  the  eastern  sky,  make  all  these 
terraces  and  peaks  translucent  with  a  wondrous 
glow.  The  best  of  all,  perhaps,  is  night,  with 
a  full  moon  hanging  high  overhead.  Who 
shall  describe  the  silhouettes  of  boats  upon  the 
shore  or  sleeping  on  the  misty  sea?  On  the 
horizon  lies  a  dusky  film  of  brownish  golden 
haze,  between  the  moon  and  the  glimmering 
water;  and  here  and  there  a  lamp  or  candle 
burns  with  a  deep  red.  Then  is  the  time  to 
take  a  boat  and  row  upon  the  bay,  or  better, 
to  swim  out  into  the  waves  and  trouble  the  re- 
flections from  the  steady  stars.  The  moun- 
tains, clear  and  calm,  with  light-irradiated 
chasms  and  hard  shadows  cast  upon  the  rock, 
soar  up  above  a  city  built  of  alabaster,  or  sea- 
foam,  or  summer  clouds.  The  whole  is  white 
and  wonderful:  no  similes  suggest  an  analogue 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE     111 

for  the  lustre,  solid  and  transparent,  of 
Amalfi  nestling  in  moonlight  between  the  gray- 
blue  sea  and  lucid  hills.  Stars  stand  on  all 
the  peaks,  and  twinkle,  or  keep  gliding,  as  the 
boat  moves,  down  the  craggy  sides.  Stars  are 
mirrored  on  the  marble  of  the  sea,  until  one 
knows  not  whether  the  oar  has  struck  sparks 
from  a  star  image  or  has  scattered  diamonds 
of  phosphorescent  brine. 

"All  this  reads  like  a  rhapsody,  but  indeed  it 
is  difficult  not  to  be  rhapsodical  when  a  May 
night  of  Amalfi  is  in  the  memory,  with  the 
echo  of  rich  baritone  voices  chanting  Neapoli- 
tan songs  to  a  mandoline." 

The  second  volume  of  his  great  work,  on 
the  Revival  of  Learning,  appeared  in  1876, 
and  the  third  volume  on  the  Fine  Arts  went 
forward  during  the  summer  in  Switzerland. 
We  find  him  working  at  the  Riederalp,  in  com- 
pany with  his  friend  H.  G.  Dakyns  and  Oscar 
Browning,  "at  feverish  speed,  in  the  midst  of 
damp  fogs  that  crept  into  our  rooms  through 
chinks  in  the  log-built  walls."  Mr.  Browning, 
in  his  Memoirs,  recalls  that  large  packets  of 
proof  sheets  would  arrive  each  morning  on  the 


112  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

breakfast  table.  These  proofs  were  of  The 
New  Republic,  which  Symonds  was  revising 
for  Mr.  Mallock.  Early  in  1877,  whilst  he  was 
lecturing  on  the  Medici  in  the  draughty 
theatre  of  the  Royal  Institution,  he  caught  a 
severe  cold,  which  passed  into  bronchitis.  Dr. 
Beddoe  of  Clifton  (to  whom  The  Renaissance 
was  dedicated)  found  that  his  left  lung  was 
in  a  dangerous  condition.  Dispatched  for 
Greece,  Symonds  stopped  in  Lombardy  and 
as  ever  went  recklessly  on  with  his  studies.  The 
malady  grew  worse  and,  realizing  that  a  dis- 
aster was  impending,  he  hurried  back  to  Clif- 
ton. The  next  day  a  severe  hemorrhage  be- 
fell. 

Recovery  was  not  believable.  Supposing  it 
to  be  the  end,  Symonds  put  his  affairs  in  order 
and  then  quietly  went  on  with  what  compara- 
tively simple  work  his  condition  rendered  pos- 
sible. This  was  a  translation  of  the  sonnets 
of  Campanella  and  Michael  Angelo,  already 
begun  before  the  attack  and  finished  shortly 
afterward  in  Switzerland.  The  account  of  this 
all  but  mortal  crisis  in  his  Autobiography  is 
unusually  touching,  and  he  says  that  when 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE     113 

finally  after  weeks  of  calm  resignation  to  death 
life  returned  to  him  he  seemed  to  have  been 
born  again.  "The  struggle  for  mere  life  had 
now  absorbed  and  superseded  the  struggle  for 
what  I  sought  in  life.  ...  I  was  a  child 
in  the  hands  of  something  divine,  to  which  I 
responded  with  an  infinite  gratitude."  These 
sentences  are  immediately  followed  by  his  own 
account  of  his  religious  development  and  final 
position.  The  tendency  launched  by  his 
former  mental  crisis  was  now  confirmed  by  his 
physical  crisis  at  Clifton.  His  private  struggle 
was  now  largely  replaced  by  an  eager  delight 
in  the  whole  of  life. 

His  English  days  w^ere  now,  though  he  was 
not  yet  aware  of  it,  permanently  ended.  By 
Sir  William  Jenner's  advice  he  made  arrange- 
ments to  spend  the  coming  winter  in  a  dahabieh 
on  the  Nile,  passing  a  few  weeks  in  the  High 
Alps  as  a  preliminary  tonic.  As  it  happened, 
his  sister  Charlotte  and  her  husband  Professor 
T.  H.  Green  were  staying  at  Davos  Platz. 
Enthusiastic  letters  about  the  place  attracted 
Symonds  thither;  and  on  August  7,  1877,  he 


114.  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

arrived  in  the  mountain  village  which  was 
destined  for  the  rest  of  his  life  to  be  his  home. 
He  was  taken  in  hand  by  Dr.  Ruedi,  who 
found  that  his  case  required  strict  treatment. 
For  three  weeks  he  sat  motionless  in  the  sun- 
light, and  was  then  permitted  to  lie  in  a  ham- 
mock slung  between  pine-trees  in  the  wood.  "I 
lay  watching  the  squirrels  leap  from  pine  to 
pine  over  my  head  and  the  clouds  sail  through 
the  quiet  places  of  the  sky — listening  to  my 
wife's  reading  of  Boswell's  Johnson — noticing 
the  children  play,  turning  now  and  then  a 
couplet  in  my  translation  of  Michael  Angelo's 
sonnets.  I  was  not  fit  for  wrork.  Nature  went 
healthily  to  sleep  in  me,  and  the  first  sign  of 
convalescence  was  a  slow  dim  sense  of  re- 
awakening mental  energy,  very  different  from 
the  feverish  and  fretful  activity  of  the  past 
years."  At  the  end  of  a  month  he  was  allowed 
a  little  exercise,  driving  first  and  then,  more 
and  more  ambitiously,  climbing.  As  all  went 
hopefully  he  determined  to  ignore  his  English 
doctor's  advice  and  take  the  risk  of  giving  up 
the  Egyptian  plan.  Sir  William  Jenner,  in- 
formed of  this  decision,  replied,  "If  you  like 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE     115 

to  leave  your  vile  body  to  the  Davos  doctors, 
that  is  your  affair;  I  have  warned  you."  He 
had  in  fact  warned  him  that  a  fresh  cold  would 
mean  the  end.  Certainly  one  motive  actuating 
Symonds  was  the  desire  for  an  at  least  tem- 
porary abiding-place.  Reviewing  his  life  he 
found  that  in  all  the  twenty-three  years  since 
he  had  gone  to  school  at  Harrow  he  had  never 
passed  more  than  three  consecutive  months  in 
one  place.  Though  he  did  not  for  three  more 
years  relinquish  hopes  of  returning  eventually 
to  Clifton,  he  resolved  now  to  stay  where  he 
was,  and  stubbornly  set  pen  and  brain  in  mo- 
tion again.  The  first  fruits  of  this  renewed 
activity  were  the  published  Sonnets  of  Michael 
Angela  and  Campanella,  his  first  book  of 
poems,  Many  Moods,  and  the  Life  of  Shelley 
for  the  English  Men  of  Letters  series. 

Many  Moods  was  dedicated  to  his  friend 
Roden  Noel,  of  whom  he  speaks  habitually  in 
his  writings  as  one  of  the  major  Victorian 
poets,  the  only  worthy  heir  of  the  cosmic  en- 
thusiasm of  Shelley,  Wordsworth,  and  Goethe. 
It  is  a  collection  of  travel-scenes,  tales  in 


116  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

rhyme,  meditative  sonnets,  and  songs,  many 
of  them  in  learned  metres.  A  considerable 
number  deal  with  aspects  of  Platonic  love. 
They  are  essentially  scholar-poems,  and  if  they 
do  not  rise  into  the  first  order  it  is  because  they 
do  not  spring  convincingly  from  direct  ex- 
perience of  life — the  central  human  emotions 
are  over-subtilized  and  refracted  through  the 
prism  of  culture.  Nor  have  they  the  power 
of  precipitating  the  quintessential  in  remote 
moods  which  marks  the  somewhat  similar  work 
of  Arnold  and  Clough.  They  suffer  at  every 
point  from  Symonds'  usual  fault  of  wordiness, 
his  incapacity  to  seize  quickly  and  victoriously 
upon  bright  moments  of  emotion  and  fancy, 
and  his  excessive  use  of  unvitalized  ornamenta- 
tion. Still,  it  is  impossible  to  ignore,  in  this 
volume  and  its  successor,  New  and  Old  (1880) , 
his  really  astonishing  faculty  in  descriptive 
poetry.  What  he  could  do  in  calling  up 
natural  scenery,  settings,  barbaric  pageants 
may  be  seen  from  The  Valley  of  Vain  Desires 
and  the  opening  pages  of  Odatis  and 
Zariadres: 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE    117 

.     .     .     "Now  the  tread 
Of  elephants  with  vine  leaves  garlanded 
Went  crushing  blossoms  with  huge  feet;  their  gray 
Lithe  trunks  were  curled  to  snuff  the  scents  of  May, 
And  on  their  castled  backs  and  shoulders  vast 
Flamed  cressets;  on  the  live  coals  negroes  cast 
Spices  of  myrrh  and  frankincense,  and  boys 
Like  naked  Cupids  made  a  merry  noise 
Swinging  from  flank  and  dewlap,  showering  spray 
Of  cakes  and  comfits  from  gilt  quivers  gay. 
Next  came  the  priests,  intoning  as  they  went 
Praises  and  prayers — their  dusky  foreheads  bent 
Beneath  the  weight  of  mitres  stiff  with  gems; 
And  on  their  breasts  and  on  the  broidered  hems 
Of  their  loose  raiment  glittered  runes  that  none 
Might  read,  so  far  ago  in  ages  gone 
By  men  whose  very  memories  are  flown 
Were   those   strange   legends   wrought   in   tongues   un- 
known. 

Behind  them  followed  oxen  white  as  snow, 
Large-limbed,  with  meek  eyes  wild  and  round  and  slow; 
Lowing  they  went,  and  girls  beside  them  held 
Red  rosewreaths  on  their  necks  and  shoulders  belled 
With  golden  bubbles." 

Yet  this  is  less  the  work  of  a  poet  than  of  a 
student  of  Italian  painting.  Of  all  the  poems 
in  the  two  volumes  the  most  inevitably  touched 
seems  to  me  that  called  To  Rhodocleia,  the 


118  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

last  two  lines  of  which  are  adapted  from  a 
Greek  epigram  of  Rufinus : 

"To  thee  whose  name  and  fame  are  of  roses, 

Fair  Rhodocleia,  this  wreatli  from  me 
Shall  speak  of  youth  when  the  bloom  uncloses, 
And  speak  of  death  and  the  days  to  be. 

Here  in  narcissus  the  rathe  rain-lover, 

And  here  are  wavering  wind-flowers  frail, 

And  here  are  roses  that  wreathe  and  cover 
The  foreheads  of  men  by  love  made  pale; 

Violets  blue  as  the  veins  that  wander 

O'er  breasts  we  love  when  we  dream  Love  true, 
And  lilies  that  laugh  to  the  sunlight  yonder 

On  meadows  drenched  with  the  morning  dew. 

But  when  this  crown  on  thy  brow  reposes, 
Learn  from  the  blossoms,  and  be  not  vain; 

For  time  fades  thee,  as  he  fades  the  roses ; 
Nor  they  nor  thou  may  revive  again." 

I  think  this  would  not  be  out  of  place  in  John- 
son-Cory's exquisite  lonica. 

Of  the  Shelley  book  little  need  be  said  ex- 
cept so  far  as  its  subject  throws  light  on  Sy- 
monds  himself.  It  is  merely  a  competent  ab- 
stract of  previous  records,  like  most  of  those 


AT  CLIFTON:  LITERATURE     119 

in  the  series  to  which  it  belongs.  What  its 
publisher  thought  of  it  may  be  seen  from  a 
letter  of  Alexander  Macmillan,  November  22, 
1878:  "I  like  your  book  very  much  and  think 
it  makes  the  clearest  and  simplest  complete 
presentation  of  the  man  we  have.  ...  I 
cannot  help  being  gratified  that  we  have  had 
the  honor  of  publishing  what  is  on  the  whole 
the  best,  completest,  and  most  rational  account 
of  so  noble,  beautiful,  if  also  very  erratic  and 
perplexing,  a  character."  There  is  something 
suggestive  in  the  writing  of  this  life  of  Shelley 
just  at  the  moment  when  his  own  poetry  was 
first  being  published.  Shelley  had  been  from 
earliest  childhood  one  of  the  men  to  whose  writ- 
ings he  had  submitted  himself  with  "slow, 
dumb  inhibition."  With  his  own  ruling  passion 
for  poetry  he  must  have  learned  from  Shelley, 
whose  life  was  one  long  uninterrupted  purga- 
tion through  love,  how  impossible  it  is  to  be  a 
poet  when  one's  life  is  not  poetical.  He  must 
have  observed  what  a  small  part  was  played  by 
taste  in  Shelley's  education;  devouring  trashy 
novels,  political  economy,  promiscuous  science 
—literature  being  only  incidental  with  him, 


120  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

life  appearing  everywhere  in  the  rough.  That 
was  the  training,  so  unlike  his  own,  cautious, 
respectable,  directed  by  Jowett,  overweighted 
with  aesthetics,  which  went  to  the  making  of 
a  poet  of  whom  Symonds  says:  "A  genuine 
liking  for  Prometheus  Unbound  may  be 
reckoned  the  touchstone  of  a  man's  capacity 
for  understanding  lyric  poetry."  One  recalls 
his  remark  at  the  close  of  his  own  Oxford 
career:  "The  fault  of  my  education  as  a 
preparation  for  literature  was  that  it  was  ex- 
clusively literary."  We  do  only  what  we  are, 
and  we  are  what  life  has  made  us. 


CHAPTER  V 
DAVOS:    THE  RENAISSANCE:    ANIMI  FIGUKA 

DAVOS  in  1877  was  different  indeed  from 
the  Davos  of  to-day.  An  ancient  village 
with  seven  centuries  of  history,  it  had  been,  till 
1799,  when  it  was  incorporated  in  the  Swiss 
Republic,  a  political  centre  of  the  Graubiinden 
or  Gray  League.  Then  at  last  its  main  fam- 
ilies, who  held  titles  of  nobility  from  France, 
Germany,  and  Austria  and  had  provided  gov- 
ernors, field-marshals,  podestas,  and  ambassa- 
dors to  most  of  the  courts  and  armies  of  Eu- 
rope, relapsed  into  the  condition  of  hardy 
peasants  and  frugal  specimens  of  the  mountain 
democracy:  farmers,  vintners,  herdsmen,  inn- 
keepers with  immemorial  pedigrees.  Of  its 
old  grandeur  not  a  trace  remained,  except  in- 
deed the  Rathhaus,  the  white  church  with  tow- 
ering spire,  and  a  few  panelled  rooms  and 
family  portraits  in  some  of  the  substantial 

121 


122  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

scattered  farmhouses.  In  1862  the  local 
physician  published  in  a  German  medical  re- 
view his  observations  of  the  fact  that  tuber- 
culosis was  unknown  in  the  valley,  while 
Davosers  who  had  contracted  the  disease  in 
foreign  parts  made  speedy  cures  on  their  re- 
turn. A  well-known  German  doctor,  himself 
gravely  afflicted,  resolved  to  make  the  experi- 
ment, rash  enough  in  those  days  when  con- 
sumption was  coddled  in  close  rooms.  This 
Dr.  linger,  entirely  cured  himself,  in  a  few 
years  turned  the  forgotten  village  into  what 
we  know  as  an  approved  health-station.  It 
was  at  first  known  almost  exclusively  to  Ger- 
mans. Its  ultimate  fame  among  English  and 
Americans  was  due  more  to  the  presence  and 
activity  of  Symonds  than  to  any  other  cause. 
In  course  of  time  his  position  there  became 
almost  patriarchal — so  far  as  that  word  may 
be  used  of  an  invalid  artist  dwelling  among 
true  patriarchs.  Patriarch  lie  was  however  by 
virtue  of  his  reputation,  his  growing  family, 
the  money  that  he  spent  with  such  wise  care, 
the  sympathy,  half  brotherly,  half  fatherly, 
which  he  extended  to  the  natives  of  the  place, 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE    123 

and  the  genial  spirit  of  advertisement  in  which 
he  spread  abroad  the  fame  of  the  valley,  its 
robust  life,  its  work  and  sports,  its  wines,  and 
its  inns. 

The  first  close  friendship  he  formed  among 
the  Davosers  was  with  Christian  Buol, 
younger  brother  of  Herr  Buol,  the  innkeeper, 
who  became  a  sort  of  guide,  servant,  and  com- 
panion to  him.  Few  noble  houses  of  Europe 
are  so  illustrious  in  their  ancestry  as  this 
peasant  clan.  Their  cousins  were  Counts  in 
Austria  and  Freiherrs  of  the  German  Empire 
and  they  retained  a  patent  of  nobility  con- 
ferred upon  them  by  Henri  IV  of  France. 
The  head  of  the  clan,  Herr  Buol  of  the  inn, 
could  assemble  on  New  Year's  eve  his  wife  and 
his  mother,  five  brothers  out  of  nine  with  four 
sisters,  and  could  seat  below  the  salt  a  host 
of  porters,  maids,  serving-folk.  Truly  a  sub- 
ject for  Sir  Walter  Scott.  The  continued 
prosperity  of  the  house  was  due  to  the  wisdom, 
tact,  and  power  of  Symonds.  As  often  hap- 
pens when  an  old  and  simple  village  is  sud- 
denly transformed  into  a  fashionable  resort, 
the  original  inhabitants  are  deprived  by  shrewd 


124  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

promoters  from  sharing  in  the  commercial 
benefit.  Symonds,  who  knew  the  world  very 
well,  insensibly  became  the  wise  and  helpful 
middleman  between  the  two  populations.  He 
made  a  detailed  study  of  the  situation,  throw- 
ing the  weight  of  his  influence  on  the  side  of 
the  peasants  and  scheming  in  every  possible 
way  to  place  them  in  control.  In  a  business- 
like way  he  advanced  enough  money  to  the 
Buols  to  place  them  abreast  of  the  incoming 
capital.  His  disinterested  skill,  thus  displayed 
so  tactfully  and  successfully  in  a  delicate  cause, 
quickened  his  hold  on  Davos  life,  and  he  be- 
came the  friend  and  counsellor  of  the  whole 
village.  Meanwhile  he  moved  his  family  into 
a  suite  of  rooms  at  the  .Hotel  Buol,  which  con- 
tinued to  be  his  home  for  three  years  and  until 
his  own  house  was  built. 

Thriving  so  vigorously  under  his  new  condi- 
tions that  he  was  able,  at  the  close  of  the  first 
winter,  to  take  rough  daylong  jaunts  through 
the  snow  in  open  sledges,  he  did  not  give  up 
hope  of  returning  to  Clifton.  We  find  him 
writing  in  February,  1878,  to  Edmund  Gosse 
that  he  meditates  "sending  for  a  cartload  of 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE     125 

books  in  order  to  go  on  with  The  Renaissance" 
That  year  was  interrupted  by  two  journeys 
into  Italy,  in  April,  when  the  invalid  colony 
was  turned  adrift  by  the  doctors  to  avoid  the 
intermediate  conditions  of  melting  snow,  and 
in  the  autumn;  and  this  became  a  part  of  his 
yearly  routine.  The  prospect  of  a  second 
winter,  with  its  monotony,  its  imprisoned  isola- 
tion, and  almost  excessive  quickening  of  the 
spirit,  was  not  easy;  yet  in  November  he 
wrote,  "I  will  still  take  the  tree  of  beauty  and 
shake  the  apples  on  my  head." 

The  opening  of  1879  found  him  issuing  his 
twelfth  book.  In  spite  of  renewed  ill-health 
and  hours  of  pain  more  terrible  than  he  had 
ever  endured,  the  year  was  a  very  active  one. 
Between  February  and  November  he  wrote, 
in  their  first  draft,  the  entire  two  volumes  on 
Italian  Literature  which  form  the  fourth  and 
fifth  of  The  Renaissance.  He  also  prepared 
American  editions  of  the  Greek  Poets  and  the 
Italian  Sketches,  and  revised  the  Age  of  the 
Despots.  It  was  with  the  plan  already  formed 
of  building  a  house  at  Davos  and  making  it 
perhaps  a  permanent  home  that  he  returned  to 


126  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

England  in  the  early  summer  of  1880.  The 
unfavorable  report  on  his  health  of  the  London 
doctors  now  at  last  confirmed  this  prospect, 
and  he  resolved  to  make  the  final  break  with 
England.  He  went  back  to  Clifton,  dis- 
mantled his  old  home,  prepared  it  for  sale,  and 
heaped  a  great  bonfire  in  the  garden  with  his 
own  papers  and  depressing  family  archives. 
"It  was  rather  pretty,"  he  observes,  "to  see 
Catherine  and  my  four  children  all  engaged  in 
tearing  up  the  letters  of  a  lifetime."  Then, 
with  feelings  not  unlike  those  of  Adam  and 
Eve  in  the  last  lines  of  Paradise  Lost,  sadly 
but  with  a  consoling  resolution,  he  returned  to 
Switzerland.  He  was  now  exactly  forty  years 
old. 

Settling  for  a  permanent  stay  in  the  autumn 
of  1880,  Symonds  began  his  new  life  with 
accustomed  energy.  An  enthusiastic  magazine 
article,  Davos  in  Winter,  which  had  more 
effect  probably  than  any  other  influence  in 
establishing  the  Anglo-American  colony,  was 
now  followed  by  a  letter  to  The  Pall  Mall 
Gazette  calling  attention  to  the  urgent  need 
of  sanitary  reforms  in  the  place.  This  letter 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE    127 

was  reprinted  in  three  principal  French  and 
German  newspapers,  and  brought  down  upon 
him  the  fury  of  the  village  authorities.  Sy- 
monds  had  foreseen  the  perils  that  were  bound 
to  come,  and  have  come,  with  a  swift-increas- 
ing population  of  invalids.  His  prompt  ac- 
tion led  to  a  complete  overhauling  of  the 
town's  drainage,  and  after  the  first  ill-will  had 
blown  over  it  established  his  position  as  a  dis- 
interested, energetic  citizen  and  confirmed  in 
Davos  the  career  of  public  usefulness  which 
had  been  cut  short  at  Clifton.  Having  dis- 
charged this  message  he  set  about  building  his 
new  home,  Am  Hof,  a  kind  of  glorified 
chalet,  with  high-pitched  roof  covered  with  zinc 
plates  to  shed  the  snow.  Into  this,  at  the  end 
of  two  years,  the  family  moved  on  September 
25,  1882. 

The  year  1881  saw  the  publication  of  the 
fourth  and  fifth  volumes  of  The  Renaissance 
in  Italy.  The  work  was  now  complete,  for  the 
two  final  volumes  on  the  Catholic  Reaction 
(1886) — in  many  ways  the  ablest  of  all — seem 
to  have  been  an  afterthought.  In  its  original 
plan  The  Renaissance  was  to  have  comprised 


128  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

probably  only  three  volumes.  The  general 
idea  that  it  was  to  discuss  all  the  aspects  of 
the  period — politics,  social  conditions,  fine  #rts, 
literature,  scholarship,  religion — had  been  as- 
sumed from  the  beginning.  But  this  general 
idea  was  not,  properly  speaking,  animated  with 
any  great  coherent  vision  of  the  whole.  From 
this  vital  defect  the  work  without  question  suf- 
fers. It  is  a  colossal  patchwork,  based  on  ele- 
ments entirely  adequate  in  themselves,  but  exe- 
cuted in  a  casual  fashion  such  as  probably  no 
other  equally  ambitious  work  has  ever  been 
subjected  to.  It  is  not,  of  course,  intended  to  be 
a  continuous  narrative.  Each  volume  or  pair 
of  volumes  is  complete  in  itself  and  sums  up 
independently  the  special  phase  which  forms 
its  subject.  In  this  way,  and  in  the  fact  that 
it  consists  of  a  series  of  bright  pictures,  it  re- 
sembles the  Main  Currents  of  George  Brandes. 
The  Renaissance,  as  we  have  seen,  was  the 
main  subject  of  Symonds'  study  from  Oxford 
days.  It  was  the  theme  of  his  Chancellor's 
Prize  essay  in  1865.  But  for  many  years  he 
wavered  in  his  choice  of  schemes  between  the 
Renaissance  in  Italy  and  the  Renaissance  in 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE     129 

England.  He  always  felt  that  the  spiritual 
connection  between  those  two  countries  at  that 
period  was  closer  than  between  any  others, 
English  and  Italian  poetry  being,  as  he  said, 
twin  sisters;  and  he  found  in  the  English 
drama  and  Italian  painting  the  two  most  per- 
fect instances  of  his  theory  of  evolution  in  art. 
The  history  of  the  English  Renaissance  was 
never  carried  out,  although  Shokspere's  Pre- 
decessors should  be  regarded  as  an  introduc- 
tory volume,  complete  in  itself,  while  the  lives 
of  Sidney  and  Jonson  may  be  taken  as  fur- 
ther fragments  of  the  same  long-projected 
scheme.  To  the  history  of  the  Italian  Renais- 
sance, using  that  word  in  its  wide  sense,  he  con- 
tributed in  seven  complete  works  in  addition 
to  the  magnum  opus.  Chronologically  by  sub- 
ject these  works  are:  Wine,  Women  and 
Song,,  ballads  of  the  wandering  students  in 
whom,  at  the  breaking-up  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
the  new  spirit  first  blossomed ;  the  Introduction 
to  Dante  and  the  study  of  Boccaccio,  the  Life 
of  Michael  Angela,  the  Sonnets  of  Michael 
Angelo  and  Campanella,  and  the  translation 
of  Cellini's  Memoirs,  to  which  may  be  added 


130  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

the  Memoirs  of  Gozzi,  the  dregs  and  lees  of 
the  Renaissance  spirit  in  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury. Taken  together  then,  the  fourteen 
volumes,  with  countless  isolated  essays  and 
poems,  represent  a  close  study  in  all  its  stages 
of  that  parabola  which,  in  Symonds'  favorite 
metaphor,  describes  the  ascent  and  descent  of 
a  nation's  spiritual  evolution. 

Although  almost  every  phase  of  this  long 
evolution  is  discussed  with  impartial  sympathy, 
and  many  of  its  moments  are  brilliantly  pre- 
sented, this  great  mass  of  writings  was  not,  as 
I  have  said,  animated  with  any  great  coherent 
vision  of  the  whole.  The  Renaissance  in  Italy 
is  a  work  of  almost  the  same  compass  as 
Gibbon's  Decline  and  Fall.  But  the  very  name 
of  Gibbon  suggests  the  essential  weakness  of 
Symonds  as  a  historian.  Gibbon's  was  a  pas- 
sive mind — a  mind  which  for  long  years  could 
lie  fallow,  open  to  influences,  inhibitive,  capa- 
ble of  long  and  silent  absorption,  untroubled 
by  the  furor  scribendi.  His  history  was  the 
subject  of  an  almost  unbroken  meditation  and 
silent  labor  through  twenty-four  years,  un- 
folding itself  out  of  an  obscure  but  inflexible 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE    131 

purpose,  minutely  prepared  before  he  ever  put 
pen  to  paper.  Cotter  Morrison  tells  of  the 
"calm  stretches  of  thorough  and  contented 
work,  which  have  left  their  marks  on  the 
Decline  and  Fall.  One  of  its  charms  is  a  con- 
stant good  humor  and  complacency ;  not  a  sign 
is  visible  that  the  writer  is  pressed  for  time, 
or  wants  to  get  his  performance  out  of  hand; 
but,  on  the  contrary,  a  calm  lingering  over 
details,  sprightly  asides  in  the  notes,  which  the 
least  hurry  would  have  suppressed  or  passed 
by,  and  a  general  impression  conveyed  of  thor- 
ough enjoyment  in  the  immensity  of  the 
labor."  It  is  all  this  which  made  him  wrhat 
Lamartine  describes  in  the  phrase  "an  empty 
corridor  through  which  the  wind  passes,"  the 
self -unconscious  vessel  from  which  classic 
works  are  distilled.  A  comparison  with  Gibbon 
serves  admirably  to  throw  into  relief  the 
method  of  Symonds.  That  method  is  de- 
scribed in  an  entry  of  1866,  which  closes  with 
a  reference  to  the  true  method,  so  impossible 
to  him.  "When  engaged  on  a  subject,"  he 
says,  "it  is  good  to  throw  off  casual  jottings 
and  short  essays,  infimce  species,  as  it  were, 


132  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

in  the  order  of  composition.  These  ought, 
however,  to  be  frequently  inspected,  so  that 
their  results  may  be  wrought  into  unity;  in 
time  a  number  of  preliminary  syntheses,  media 
aociomata,  would  thus  be  gained,  and  all  lead 
up  to  the  organic  view.  This,  at  least,  is  the 
idea  of  my  method.  Another  way  would  be 
to  keep  all  in  solution  in  the  mind  until  the 
final  process  of  crystallization.  No  doubt  this 
would  be  the  most  vigorous  and  artistic  way." 
It  is  easy  to  see  that  this  idea  of  "preliminary 
syntheses"  in  a  large  work  is  essentially  a 
vicious  one;  for,  as  a  result,  the  organic  view 
springs  from  a  combination  of  almost  acci- 
dental points  discovered  in  composition. 
Artistic  truth  is  itself  a  whole,  which  is  not 
composed  of  partial  truths. 

The  comparison  of  methods  leads  inevitably 
to  the  comparison  of  lives  and  characters. 
Gibbon  could  never  have  produced  his  work 
had  lie  not  been  a  strong-fibred,  single-minded, 
complacent,  sedentary  man,  in  health  and  cir- 
cumstances which  permitted  him  to  remain  for 
long  periods  in  one  place — had  he  not  been,  in 
short,  everything  that  Symonds  was  not. 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE     133 

With  Symonds  the  "still  air  of  delightful 
studies"  was  broken  by  all  the  breezes  of 
Europe.  His  nature  was  almost  infinitely 
resonant,  thrilled  by  all  the  cross-vibrations  of 
a  complex  age.  He  was  neurotic,  dissatisfied, 
fretfully  active,  the  theatre  of  a  lifelong  and 
frantic  battle  between  ambition  and  disease. 
With  time  and  death  at  his  heels  he  poured 
out  book  after  book  in  the  fearful  hope  of 
depositing  some  record  of  his  having  lived. 
The  "well-ripened  fruit  of  wise  delay"  could 
never  spring  from  such  a  withered  bough. 
Much  of  his  life,  moreover,  was  passed  in  in- 
tellectual isolation,  a  very  different  thing  from 
intellectual  solitude.  Quick  journeys  back  and 
forth,  when  over  and  over  again  his  life  was 
a  mere  hazard,  enabled  him  to  catch  frequently 
the  spirit  of  works  and  men  with  a  poignant 
and  almost  terrible  intensity  where  he  could 
not  remain  to  gather  the  more  material  sub- 
stance. Snatching  life  himself  he  snatched 
always  at  history;  and  the  world  became  the 
mirror  of  his  own  soul,  like  him  troubled, 
iridescent,  racing  against  inscrutable,  over- 
whelming forces,  dominated  by  a  few  calm  and 


134  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

majestic  intellects,  Goethe,  Marcus  Aurelius, 
Plato.  Only  men  who  feel,  as  Symonds  felt, 
the  interminable  flux  of  things,  who  see  the 
sky  with  its  freight  of  worlds  wheeling  in- 
exorably on,  can  so  adore  the  few  fixed  stars 
of  the  human  firmament. 

Moreover,  Symonds  was  far  more  of  a 
writer  than  a  thinker.  I  have  already  quoted 
his  incisive  statement  that  he  was  "impene- 
trably reserved  in  the  depth  of  himself, 
rhetorically  candid  on  the  surface,"  and  I  have 
referred  to  Pater's  comment  that  the  Age  of 
the  Despots  was  wanting  in  reserve.  It  must 
have  struck  readers  generally  that  his  critical 
writings,  and  especially  his  travel-essays,  are 
so  far  from  reserved  as  to  be  even  garrulous. 
The  outward  circumstances  of  his  life  are  re- 
peated again  and  again,  almost  flaunted,  in 
such  works  as  Our  Life  in  the  Swiss  High- 
lands. His  passion  for  mere  words  was  con- 
tinually running  away  with  him.  He  enjoyed, 
required  as  a  physical  tonic,  the  sheer  manual 
labor  of  writing.  What  he  called  "the  im- 
possible problem  of  style"  was  with  him  the 
problem  of  winning  restraint.  Preparing  bis 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE     135 

Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Dante  for  a 
second  edition  in  1890,  he  wrote  in  the  preface, 
"I  have  altered  many  turns  of  phrase  which 
seemed  to  me  deficient  in  sobriety  or  dubious 
in  taste."  He  labored  incessantly  to  prune 
and  chasten  his  overblown,  luxuriant  manner. 
He  speaks  somewhere  of  Politian's  "special 
qualities  of  fluency  and  emptiness  of  content," 
and  his  natural  affinity  with  just  these  qualities 
is  proved  by  the  abundance  of  translations  he 
has  made  from  Politian  and  by  the  fact  that 
precisely  these  translations  are  of  all  that  he 
made  surpassingly  excellent.  Politian,  the  gay 
scholar,  the  fluent,  facile  poet,  found  in  Sy- 
monds  his  inevitable  interpreter.  It  is  plain 
from  all  this  that  Symonds,  like  shy  people 
who  talk  too  much  through  fear  of  them- 
selves, used  literature  as  a  refuge  from  self. 
"Heaven  knows  how  difficult  I  find  it  to  keep 
my  mind  healthy  when  I  am  not  working," 
he  writes  in  a  letter  of  1873,  which  recalls  the 
complaint  of  Sainte-Beuve:  "I  eat  my  heart 
out  when  I  am  not  up  to  the  neck  in  work." 
And  in  a  letter  of  1867  he  says,  "We  must 
make  the  machine  of  the  brain  go.  It  does 


136  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

not  do  to  let  it  stop.  Whatever  happens, 
energize."  How  far  did  this  sheer  pathological 
necessity  of  turning  out  written  words  inter- 
fere with,  determine  the  quality  of  his  work? 
It  produced  twenty-five  substantial  volumes  in 
the  space  of  fourteen  years,  but  it  certainly 
prevented  the  composition  of  any  one  immor- 
tal paragraph. 

This  is  really  the  heart  of  the  problem.  The 
lack  of  that  final,  absolute  touch  in  any  of  his 
writings  is  due,  I  think,  to  the  confusion  and 
intertwining  of  the  subjective  and  the  ob- 
jective— the  impenetrable  reserve  and  the 
rhetorical  candor.  True  literature  strikes  a 
middle  term,  where  self  and  theme  coalesce. 
In  poems,  essays,  subjective  work  theme  is 
harmoniously  submerged  in  personality,  just 
as  in  really  great  histories  and  biographies  per- 
sonality is  harmoniously  submerged  in  theme. 
Symonds,  not  in  his  biographies,  not  in  his 
magnum  opus,  reaches  this  point;  certainly  not 
in  his  poems  or  essays.  He  is  not  quite  the 
true  historian,  the  true  biographer,  who  finds 
satisfaction  in  a  just  view  of  objects.  In  all 
his  pseudo-objective  books  the  history  of  the 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE    137 

man  or  the  epoch  is,  one  feels,  continually  be- 
ing utilized,  restlessly,  half-consciously,  in 
place  of  strictly  creative  work,  to  test  the  point 
of  view  of  its  author.  As  a  corollary,  in  his 
subjective  work,  his  poems,  his  personal  essays, 
one  feels  that  the  author  is  trying  to  get  away 
from  himself,  to  submerge  himself  in  objects. 
He  cannot  find  himself  because  he  cannot  lose 
himself.  Hence  this  morbid  shyness — getting 
himself  by  a  kind  of  blunder  into  the  fore- 
ground of  his  objective  themes  and  on  the 
other  hand  failing  to  subdue  objects  to  him- 
self: neither  the  literature  of  knowledge  nor 
yet  the  literature  of  power,  but  always  a  fatal 
mixture  of  both. 

Symonds  felt  that  settling  in  Switzerland 
"put  an  end  to  his  becoming  a  scholar  in  the 
exact  sense."  In  reality  nature  had  made  that 
decision  long  before.  Working  through  many 
anxious  years  when  he  could  snatch  the  oppor- 
tunity, a  fortnight  now  among  the  Perugia  ar- 
chives, a  hasty  visit  in  England,  composing  in 
draughty  village  hotels,  with  treacherous  eye- 
sight, perpetually  on  guard  against  physical 
collapse,  he  could  be  only  what  he  called  a 


138  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

"literary  viveur"  At  the  same  time,  consider- 
ing himself  rather  an  artist  than  a  scholar,  he 
believed  that  he  was  justified  in  producing 
sympathetic  studies  where  the  paraphernalia 
of  scholarship  were  inadequate.  Mark  Patti- 
son,  the  grim  don,  finding  him  at  work  on  The 
Renaissance  in  a  hotel  room  at  Davos,  ob- 
served, "Of  course,  you  cannot  be  thinking  of 
writing  a  book  here."  To  what  was,  under 
the  circumstances,  a  particularly  supercilious 
insult,  Symonds  replied:  "Certainly  I  am; 
since  I  write  for  my  distraction  and  pastime, 
I  intend  to  make  the  best  of  my  resources,  and 
I  hold  that  a  great  deal  of  nonsense  is  talked 
about  the  scholar's  vocation;  men  who  might 
have  written  excellent  books  are  sterilized  by 
starting  with  fastidious  conceits."  It  was  not 
with  any  personal  venom,  we  may  believe,  but 
the  expression  of  that  clash  of  irreconcilable 
temperaments  and  aims  which  may  here  be 
read  between  the  lines,  that  led  Symonds  later 
to  hold  up  Mark  Pattison  as  an  awful  example 
of  the  slovenly  prose  of  English  scholarship. 
Hoth  were  entirely  right,  according  to  the 
lights  of  each.  Kxact  scholarship  at  any  price 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE     139 

was  the  aim  of  Pattison:  the  art  of  letters  to 
Symonds  was  the  great  matter.  Yet  where 
matters  of  scholarship  were  at  stake  the  situa- 
tion is  itself  the  most  illuminating  kind  of 
criticism.  Symonds  had  no  continuous  access 
to  any  libraries  but  his  own,  and  he  had  not 
certainly  the  kind  of  memory  which  enabled 
Macaulay  (when  he  wished  to  do  so)  to  turn 
out  extensive  and  accurate  masses  of  fact  on 
shipboard  or  in  foreign  lands  without  the  aid 
of  a  single  book.  Circumstances  of  this  kind 
made  his  efforts  more  laborious  and  his  results 
less  substantial  than  is  conventionally  the  case, 
and  he  was  probably  right  when  he  said,  "Few 
writers,  I  take  it,  have  undergone  such  pre- 
paratory labor  as  I  am  obliged  to  go  through." 
So  it  is  not  surprising  that  The  Renaissance 
in  Italy  presents  no  calm  sweep,  no  truly  co- 
herent vision,  and  a  perspective  which  the  most 
elementary  student  can  see  is  at  fault.  Fred- 
eric Harrison  observes  that  it  contains  hardly 
a  word  about  the  Science  of  the  Renaissance, 
the  great  progress  then  made  in  astronomy, 
surgery,  mechanics,  geography,  botany,  medi- 
cine. The  names  of  Columbus,  Galileo,  Car- 


140  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

dano  are  barely  mentioned.  The  proportions 
are  gravely  at  fault.  Cellini  receives  a  special 
chapter  because  his  life  illustrates  the  period: 
yet  Leonardo,  whose  character  is  far  more  sig- 
nificantly typical,  occupies  only  fourteen  pages 
and  a  few  scattered  references,  Titian  and 
Tintoretto  together  hardly  half  that  number, 
while  Signorelli  has  fifteen  pages,  or  five  more 
than  Raphael.  These  proportions,  instead  of 
being  architectural  in  the  right  way,  are 
whimsically  personal.  Cellini,  for  mainly  ex- 
tra-artistic reasons,  was  a  special  favorite  of 
Symonds;  while  Signorelli  appealed  to  him 
unduly  as  a  precursor  of  his  hero  Michael  An- 
gelo. 

In  the  thirteenth  chapter  of  the  seventh  vol- 
ume— that  on  the  Eclectic  painters  of  Bologna 
— occurs  the  well-known  passage  wherein  Sy- 
monds sums  up  his  critical  creed.     This  pas- 
sage, I  may  observe,  was  taken  as  a  kind  of 
text,  in  his  Criticism  and  Fiction,  by  William 
Dean   Howells,  who  there  remarks  that  the 
solid  ground  taken  by  Symonds  is  "not  essen- 
\  tially  different  from  that  of  Burke's  Essay  on 
\  the  Sublime  and  the  Beautiful."  After  com- 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE    141 

meriting  on  the  revolutions  of  taste  which  have 
marked  the  history  of  aesthetics  and  which  in 
particular  have  brought  so  low  the  idols  of 
Sir  Joshua  Reynolds,  he  goes  on: 

"Our  hope  with  regard  to  the  unity  of  taste 
in  the  future  then  is,  that  all  sentimental  or 
academic  seekings  after  the  ideal  having  been 
abandoned,  momentary  theories  founded  upon 
idiosyncratic  or  temporary  partialities  ex- 
ploded, and  nothing  accepted  but  what  is  solid 
and  positive,  the  scientific  spirit  shall  make  men 
progressively  more  and  more  conscious  of 
those  bleibende  Verhtiltnisse,  more  and  more 
capable  of  living  in  the  whole;  also,  that  in 
proportion  as  we  gain  a  firmer  hold  upon  our 
own  place  in  the  world,  we  shall  come  to  com- 
prehend with  more  instinctive  certitude  what 
is  simple,  natural,  and  honest,  welcoming  with 
gladness  all  artistic  products  that  exhibit  these 
qualities.  The  perception  of  the  enlightened 
man  will  then  be  the  task  of  a  healthy  person 
who  has  made  himself  acquainted  with  the  laws 
of  evolution  in  art  and  in  society,  and  is  able 
to  test  the  excellence  of  work  in  any  stage 
from  immaturity  to  decadence  by;  discerning 


142  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

what  there  is  of  truth,  sincerity,  and  natural 
vigor  in  it." 

This  passage  recalls  his  earlier  statement  in 
the  Greek  Poets  that  "no  one  should  delude  us 
into  thinking  that  true  culture  does  not  come 
from  the  impassioned  study  of  everything, 
however  eccentric  and  at  variance  with  our 
own  mode  of  life,  that  is  truly  great."  These 
two  passages,  widely  separated  in  date,  may 
then  be  taken  as  the  permanent  standpoint 
upon  which  he  based  his  critical  writings.  It 
is  notable  to  find  so  complex  and  over-subtle  a 
character  emerging  upon  ground  so  simple  and, 
however  true,  so  commonplace.  Yet,  rightly 
felt,  such  commonplace  is  of  the  true  revolu- 
tionary kind. 

A  book  which,  to  illustrate  the  character  of 
Symonds,  ought  to  be  read  in  connection  with 
The  Renaissance  is  Animi  Figura,  published 
in  1882.  But  before  I  speak  of  this  I  must 
resume  the  preliminary  circumstances. 

During  the  previous  winter  Robert  Louis 
Stevenson  had  come  to  Davos,  bearing  with 
him  a  letter  of  introduction  from  Edmund 
Gosse.  In  Davos  he  remained  two  winters, 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE  143 

living  next  door  to  Symonds — "at  the  foot  of 
my  Hill  Difficulty."  This  friendship  of  two 
invalids,  prolonged  in  letters  till  death  in  ad- 
joining years,  was  charming,  without,  I  judge, 
being  wholly  sympathetic.  Stevenson  found 
Symonds  "a  far  better  and  more  interesting 
thing  than  any  of  his  books,"  and  Symonds 
nicknamed  Stevenson  the  Sprite,  "most  fantas- 
tic but  most  human."  Just  how  far  Symonds 
understood  and  just  how  far  he  failed  to  un- 
derstand the  special  genius  of  Stevenson  may 
be  guessed  from  his  suggestion  that  the  latter 
should  undertake  a  translation  of  the  Charac- 
ters of  Theophrastus.  It  was  never  carried 
out,  but  the  suggestion  is  characteristic  of  Sy- 
monds and  not  wholly  inept  as  regards  Ste- 
venson. Another  literary  emblem  of  their 
friendship  missed  fire  in  later  years  when  Ste- 
venson wrote  and  sent  Symonds  a  very  pretty 
fanciful  bit  of  prose  designed  for  a  dedicatory 
letter  of  his  book  of  South  Sea  Sketches:  for 
some  reason  when  the  book  appeared  the  letter 
did  not  appear  with  it.  Cordial  enough  the 
friendship  undoubtedly  was  between  two  men 
who  so  loved  everything  that  is  gay  and  were 


144  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

as  well  such  ardent  followers  of  Whitman. 
Under  the  name  of  "Opalstein,"  in  his  essay 
Talk  and  Talkers,  Stevenson  has  left  an  im- 
pression of  his  friend's  iridescent  hidden  fire. 
In  this  picture  of  the  "troubled  and  poetic  talk 
of  Opalstein"  we  have  a  sidelight  on  Symonds 
which  no  other  record  gives  with  equal  vivid- 
ness: 

"His  various  and  exotic  knowledge,  com- 
plete though  unready  sympathies,  and  fine, 
full,  discriminative  flow  of  language  fit  him 
out  to  be  the  best  of  talkers;  so  perhaps  he  is 
with  some,  not  quite  with  me — proxime  accessit, 
I  should  say.  He  sings  the  praises  of  the 
earth  and  the  arts,  flowers  and  jewels,  wine 
and  music,  in  a  moonlight,  serenading  manner, 
as  to  the  light  guitar ;  even  wisdom  comes  from 
his  tongue  like  singing;  no  one  is,  indeed,  more 
tuneful  in  the  upper  notes.  But  even  while 
he  sings  the  song  of  the  sirens,  he  still  hearkens 
to  the  barking  of  the  sphinx.  Jarring  Byronic 
notes  interrupt  the  flow  of  his  Horatian  hu- 
mors. His  mirth  has  something  of  the  tragedy 
of  the  world  for  its  perpetual  background;  and 
he  feasts  like  Don  Giovanni  to  a  double  or- 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE  145 

chestra,  one  lightly  sounding  for  the  dance, 
one  pealing  Beethoven  in  the  distance.  He  is 
not  truly  reconciled  either  with  life  or  with  him- 
self ;  and  this  instant  war  in  his  members  some- 
times divides  the  man's  attention.  He  does  not 
always,  not  often,  frankly  surrender  himself 
in  conversation.  He  brings  into  the  talk  other 
things  than  those  which  he  expresses;  you  are 
conscious  that  he  keeps  his  eye  on  something- 
else,  that  he  does  not  shake  off  the  world,  nor 
quite  forget  himself.  Hence  arise  occasional 
disappointments ;  even  an  occasional  unfairness 
for  his  companions,  who  find  themselves  one 
day  giving  too  much,  and  the  next,  when  they 
are  way  out  of  season,  giving  perhaps  too 
little." 

The  two  elements  recorded  here  of  Symonds 
—the  cryptic  and  the  serenading — are  con- 
nected with  Stevenson  in  two  publications.  It 
was  at  his  suggestion  and  heartened  by  his 
bright  praise  that  Symonds  collected  his  meta- 
physical sonnets  into  the  little  book  Animi 
Figura,  the  most  quintessential — and,  as  it  may 
be  called,  the  nerve-centre — of  all  his  writings. 
Just  as  we  have  seen  that  The  Renaissance, 


146  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

and  indeed  all  his  other  books,  display  the 
"rhetorical  candor"  of  his  nature,  so  this  book 
displays  that  other  quality  of  "impenetrable 
reserve."  In  this  Portrait  of  a  Mind  (the  title 
too,  borrowed  from  the  Agricola  of  Tacitus, 
was  a  suggestion  of  Stevenson's)  he  tries  for 
once  to  delineate  the  true  truth  about  himself ; 
yet,  having  resolved  to  unveil  the  sphinx  of  his 
own  nature,  he  seems  to  turn  back  hesitating, 
and  in  the  preface  his  impenetrable  reserve 
makes  a  final,  desperate  stand.  There  address- 
ing students  of  sonnet-literature  (not  *the 
poet's  world,  observe)  he  says  it  will  be  readily 
understood  that  he  is  not  offering  a  piece  of 
accurate  self-delineation,  and  again  that  the 
sonnet-writer  "shuns  the  direct  outpouring  of 
individual  joys  and  griefs  by  veiling  these  in 
a  complicated,  artificial,  stationary  structure." 
Then  having  drawn  attention  from  himself 
he  launches  into  a  technical  discussion  of  his 
use  of  sonnets  in  a  sequence  so  framed  that 
the  context  in  every  case  is  necessary  to  the 
comprehension  of  the  individual  strophe.  This 
he  considered  to  establish  a  new  precedent  in 
the  Knglish  sonnet-tradition,  and  I  believe  it 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE    147 

was  so  taken  with  some  shakings  of  the  head 
by  Mr.  Hall  Caine,  who  in  those  days  was 
versed  in  matters  of  the  kind.  The  point  is  not 
a  grave  one;  but  it  provided  Symonds  with  an 
ingenious  decoy-shelter  and  made  it  possible 
for  his  soul  to  pass  muster  as  an  experiment  in 
versification.  The  truth  is,  after  due  allow- 
ance for  this  rebuff  to  the  inquisitive,  that  the 
book  formed  as  accurate  a  piece  of  self -por- 
traiture as  an  introspective  man  could  produce : 
for  it  must  be  a  truism  that  the  best  self-por- 
traits— for  example,  those  of  Cellini  and  Gib- 
bon— have  been  produced  by  men  who  were 
not  introspective  at  all,  were  indeed  so  hardily 
objective  that  they  could  view  themselves  as 
objects. 

The  mind  here  presented,  he  says,  is  that  of 
an  artist  whose  sensibilities  are  stronger  than 
his  creative  faculty,  a  speculative  mind.  "The 
craving  for  solitude  which  possesses  the  man 
after  vain  attempts  to  realize  his  earlier  ideal, 
gives  places  to  a  conviction  of  sin  and  failure, 
inseparable  from  over-confident  application  of 
ethical  theories  to  actual  life."  The  only  is- 
sue for  such  a  mind  appears  to  be  "self-subor- 


dination  to  moral  law.  But  the  problem  of 
solving  human  difficulties  by  communion  with 
the  divine  idea  is  complicated  in  our  age.  The 
whole  series  ends,  therefore,  with  the  soul's 
debate  upon  the  fundamental  question  of 
man's  place  in  the  universe."  After  this  preg- 
nant little  sketch  it  seems  unwise  to  go  too  far 
into  detail.  The  hundred  and  forty  sonnets 
are  divided  into  groups,  some  of  a  single  son- 
net, one  comprising  as  many  as  twenty-two. 
The  Innovators  discusses  the  pro  and  con  of 
"swerving  from  the  way  of  kindly  custom"; 
Ygdrasil,  life's  eternal  subversion  of  system; 
Personality,  the  impotence  of  men  to  reach 
out  of  themselves  and  really  grasp  one  an- 
other; The  Passing  Stranger,  a  Platonic 
theme  which  occurs  repeatedly  in  Symonds' 
other  poems  and  essays;  Paths  of  Life,  the 
relation  between  lasting  and  passing  loves; 
Debate  on  Self,  the  power  of  sin  to  awaken 
life  in  the  soul,  the  power  of  courage  to  sub- 
due sin  to  the  soul,  the  power  of  good  deeds 
over  fate;  Pro  and  Con,  the  faculty  of  cour- 
rge  and  good  deeds,  however  powerless  before 
appetite,  to  rally  by  freely  testing  love  which 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE    149 

purges  lust;  Eros  and  Anteros,  the  seduction 
of  love,  the  pain  of  selfish  love,  the  longing 
for  spiritual  love;  Lf  Amour  de  I 'Impossible,  a 
theme  characteristic  of  Symonds,  which  may 
be  summed  up  in  the  Greek  proverb,  "To  de- 
sire impossibilities  is  a  sickness  of  the  soul"; 
Intellectual  Isolation ,  the  opportunity  of  the 
soul  in  solitude  and  its  self -insufficiency ;  Self- 
Condemnation,  the  soul  humbled  in  weakness 
seeking  God  and  hearing  his  voice  without 
being  able  to  find  him;  Amends,  the  soul  crav- 
ing the  good,  finding  itself  in  debt  to  sin,  yet 
steadfastly  resolving  to  strive  upward;  Ver- 
sohnung,  the  soul  needing  God  and  preparing 
to  find  him  by  forgetting  the  past  and  chas- 
tening itself;  An  Old  Gordian  Knot,  the  soul 
seeing  that  the  former  gods  were  only  Brocken- 
images  of  itself,  questioning,  though  without 
an  answer,  whether  the  sun  which  cast  the 
images  may  not  be  God  indeed;  On  the  Sacro 
Monte,  the  death  of  gods  and  faiths,  the  en- 
durance of  God  and  the  soul ;  The  Thought  of 
Death, 

"Will  not  the  large  life  of  the  universe 
Fulfill  its  children?" 


150  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

and  the  cosmic  principle,  "Though  He  slay  me 
yet  will  I  cleave  to  Him";  Mystery  of  Mys- 
teries, the  necessity  of  rejecting  all  suggested 
explanations  of  life,  and  of  enduring  in  dumb 
trust  with  hope. 

As  an  example  I  select  the  fifth  sonnet  in 
the  group  Intellectual  Isolation,  not  perhaps 
the  best  but  certainly  one  of  the  most  char- 
acteristic : 

"It  is  the  center  of  the  soul  that  ails : 

We  carry  with  us  our  own  heart's  disease ; 

And,  craving  the  impossible,  we  freeze 
The  lively  rills  of  love  that  never  fails. 
What  faith,  what  hope  will  lend  the  spirit  sails 

To  waft  her  with  a  light  spray-scattering  breeze 

From  this  Calypso  isle  of  Phantasies, 
Self-sought,  self-gendered,  where  the  daylight  pales? 
Where  wandering  visions  of  foregone  desires 

Pursue  her  sleepless  on  a  stony  strand; 

Instead  of  stars  the  bleak  and  baleful  fires 
Of  vexed  imagination,  quivering  spires 

That  have  nor  rest  nor  substance,  light  the  land, 

Paced  by  lean  hungry  men,  a  ghostly  band !" 

I  have  dwelt  at  length  upon  this  little  book 
because  it  really  tells  the  story  of  Symonds' 
inner  life,  indicated  even  by  the  brief  phrases 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE    151 

into  which  I  have  been  obliged  to  compress  it. 
It  is  indeed  the  real  Symonds,  hidden  from 
his  generation.  Although  many  of  the  prob- 
lems handled  in  it  are  discussed  more  philo- 
sophically in  his  prose  writings,  notably  the 
Study  of  Whitman  and  the  Essays  Specula- 
tive and  Suggestive,,  he  appears  in  these  son- 
nets as  a  spiritual  force,  in  distinction  from  a 
man  of  letters;  and  the  fortunes  of  the  book 
suggest  how  little  he  was  able  to  impress  him- 
self, in  that  aspect,  upon  the  world.  It  never 
passed  into  a  second  edition.  Nor  was  Sy- 
monds urgent;  for,  as  he  wrote  on  the  title- 
page  of  Many  Moods,  adapting  a  phrase  of 
Whitman,  "The  song  is  to  the  singer,  and 
comes  back  most  to  him."  Two  years  after  its 
publication  in  1882,  he  wrote  to  William 
Sharp:  "I  have  had  it  in  my  mind  to  con- 
tinue the  theme  of  Animi  Figura,  and  to  at- 
tempt to  show  how  a  character  which  has 
reached  apparent  failure  in  moral  and  spiritual 
matters  may  reconstruct  a  life's  philosophy 
and  find  sufficient  sources  of  energy  and 
health."  The  attempt  was  never  made,  and 
one  doubts  if  it  could  have  been  more  conclu- 


152  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

sive.  For  Animi  Figura  seems  to  show  the 
inevitable  extent  of  his  mental  reservation 
from  the  cosmic  enthusiasm. 

A  book  more  appropriately  connected  with 
Stevenson,  to  whom  it  was  dedicated,  was 
Wine,  Women,  and  Song  (1884) .  This  was  a 
collection  of  Goliardic  ballads  from  the  Car- 
mina  Burana  and  other  sources,  strung  to- 
gether by  a  prose  commentary.  "They  cele- 
brate," he  says,  "the  eternal  presence  of  mirth- 
making  powers  in  hearts  of  men."  Profound 
sympathy  had  Symonds,  himself  a  kind  of 
scholar-gypsy,  with  these  vagabond  students 
of  the  Middle  Ages:  perhaps  he  felt  how  much 
truer  a  poet's  education  was  theirs  than  his  at 
Jowett's  Oxford.  They  at  any  rate  were  the 
prototypes  of  our  modern  insatiable  seekers  of 
picturesque  adventure — the  open  road,  gay 
loves  and  poetry  they  had,  and  they  were  not 
afflicted  with  archaeology.  Above  all  they  had 
life  abundantly. 

This  mediaeval  anthology  bears  a  definite  re- 
lation to  all  of  Symonds'  writings.  In  one 
way  it  serves  as  a  kind  of  introduction  to  his 
many  books  on  the  Renaissance,  for  it  pictures 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE    153 

the  first  breaking  up  of  the  Ages  of  Faith, 
the  first  stirring  of  the  revived  antique  feeling 
about  the  world  and  conduct.  Moreover  it 
strongly  resembles  in  spirit  the  Elizabethan 
song-books  of  which  Symonds  wrote  so  much ; 
and  again,  in  its  "truth  to  vulgar  human  na- 
ture" it  illustrates  that  favorite  doctrine  of  his 
that  life  is  more  than  literature,  which  drew 
him  to  the  Elizabethan  drama,  to  Cellini,  and 
to  Whitman.  Symonds  was  always  fascinated, 
as  only  a  reserved,  fastidious,  intellectual  man 
can  be,  by  life  in  its  rude,  sheer,  vulgar  actual- 
ity. How  precisely  he  found  in  these  songs,  or 
put  into  them,  the  Elizabethan  spirit  may  be 
seen  from  a  single  example : 

"If  she  could  love  me  when  I  love, 
I  would  not  then  exchange  with  Jove: 
Ah!  might  I  clasp  her  once,  and  drain 
Her  lips  as  thirsty  flowers  drink  rain ! 
With  death  to  meet,  his  welcome  greet,  from  life  re- 
treat, I  were  full  fain ! 
Heigh !    full  fain,  I  were  full  fain, 
Could  I  such  joy,  such  wealth  of  pleasure  gain!" 

I  think  we  should  not  be  surprised  to  find 
that  in  Ben  Jonson. 


154  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

I  find  in  the  book  a  passage  where  Symonds 
gives  his  theory  of  translation,  and  as  it  is 
possible  that  he  will  live  longer  as  a  translator 
than  as  an  original  writer,  as  his  translations 
are  acknowledged  by  all  to  be  among  the  best 
in  the  language,  it  is  well  to  quote  wrhat  he  has 
to  say : 

"It  has  always  been  my  creed  that  a  good 
translation  should  resemble  a  plaster  cast;  the 
English  being  plaque  upon  the  original,  so  as 
to  reproduce  its  exact  form,  although  it  can- 
not convey  the  effects  of  bronze  or  marble, 
which  belong  to  the  material  of  the  work  of 
art.  But  this  method  has  not  always  seemed  to 
me  the  most  desirable  for  rendering  poems,  an 
eminent  quality  of  which  is  facility  and  spon- 
taneity. In  order  to  obtain  that  quality  in 
our  language  the  form  has  occasionally  to  be 
sacrificed.  ...  I  am  frequently  enticed  to 
repeat  experiments,  which  afterward  I  regard 
in  the  light  of  failures.  What  allures  me  first 
is  the  pleasure  of  passing  into  that  intimate 
familiarity  with  art  which  only  a  copyist  or 
translator  enjoys.  I  am  next  impelled  by  the 
desire  to  fix  the  attention  of  readers  on  things 


DAVOS:  THE  RENAISSANCE    155 

which  I  admire,  and  which  are  possibly  beyond 
their  scope  of  view.  Last  comes  that  ignis 
fatuus  of  the  hope,  forever  renewed,  if  for- 
ever disappointed,  that  some  addition  may  be 
made  in  this  way  to  the  wealth  of  English 
poetry." 

This  passage  gives  not  only  his  theory  of 
translation,  but  the  reasons  why  that  art  so 
repeatedly  attracted  him.  Between  the  lines 
we  read  the  whole  history  of  a  baffled  and  con- 
gested poet  and  the  philosophy  of  what  he  him- 
self called  a  vulgariseur. 


CHAPTER  VI 
swiss  LIFE:    WHITMAN 

ONLY  during  the  first  four  or  five  years 
in  Davos  did  Symonds  maintain  the  com- 
parative exuberance  of  health  that  succeeded 
his  collapse.  It  was  indeed,  as  he  said,  a  won- 
derful Indian  summer,  a  ripe  autumn,  rich  in 
fruit;  but  an  autumn  none  the  less  declining 
appreciably  towards  the  end.  He  felt  most 
keenly  the  isolation  from  intellectual  company 
and  from  adequate  libraries.  Knowing  that  he 
was  out  of  the  world's  current,  he  imagined 
that  all  the  rest  of  his  generation  was  forging 
far  beyond  him.  Achievements  that  look  small 
enough  in  the  world  where  achievements  are 
common  were  magnified  out  of  all  proportion 
to  Symonds  in  his  retreat.  The  reviewers  ap- 
peared to  neglect  or  slight  him  or,  as  they 
sometimes  did,  to  take  shameful  advantages  of 
him.  He  tried  to  convince  himself  that  for 
156 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      157 

him  literature  was  only  a  pastime;  in  reality, 
feeling  that  he  had  gained  no  foothold,  he 
was  made  more  sensitive  by  isolation  and  soli- 
tude. Naturally,  under  these  circumstances, 
he  strove  pathetically  to  be,  and  to  be  consid- 
ered, one  of  the  advance  guard  in  criticism. 
Feeling  himself  left  behind,  dropped  outside, 
he  became  more  and  more  attentive  to  modern 
thought,  on  which,  except  in  a  general  way,  he 
had  no  very  instinctive  grasp. 

On  one  side  of  his  nature  he  was  very  like 
Ovid:  and  his  exile  from  the  world  of  gaiety 
was  like  Ovid's  exile  on  the  Euxine.  Deprived 
of  the  keener  and  more  intimate  wit  of  cities, 
he  consoled  himself  with  the  Gothic  wit  of  the 
mountains.  He  was  the  ringleader  at  many  a 
village  festival.  He  loved  light  music,  and 
there  was  no  greater  connoisseur,  in  Switzer- 
land or  Italy,  of  all  the  friendly  vins  du  pays. 
"I  supped  with  Cator  last  night,"  he  writes. 
"A  zither  and  guitar  player — two  men — came 
afterwards  to  make  music  for  us.  We  had  up 
the  two  Christians  and  S—  — ,  drank  enormous 
quantities  of  old  wine,  sang,  laughed,  danced, 
and  made  a  most  uproarious  noise  until  2  A.  M. 


158  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

Then  the  two  Christians  and  I  descended  on 
one  toboggan  in  a  dense  snow-storm.  It  was 
quite  dark,  and  drifty  beyond  description.  I 
sprained  my  left  side  in  the  groin  a  little." 
His  friend  Mr.  Brown  recalls  an  evening  when 
Herr  Buol  the  innkeeper  bade  farewell  to  some 
friends  with  a  patriarchal  supper:  after  which 
the  whole  party,  including  Symonds,  descended 
to  the  cellars  and  each  one  strode  a  tun  of 
Veltliner,  candle  in  hand,  and  sped  the  parting 
guests. 

The  fascination  of  rude  and  heartily  active 
life  led  him  to  choose,  even  for  study,  the 
smoke-room  of  the  inn,  crowded  as  it  was  with 
burly  working-men.  He  loved  to  sit  in  the 
stables,  in  the  dim  candlelight,  smoking  his 
pipe  and  talking  with  the  herdsmen  when  the 
day's  work  was  done.  He  would  go  toboggan- 
ing alone  at  midnight  and  in  all  weathers.  He 
loved  the  falling  snow,  the  smell  of  hay,  the 
slow-breathing  cattle. 

He  was  the  friend  of  half  the  Swiss  hotel- 
porters  in  Europe,  knew  their  fathers  and 
brothers  at  home  and  all  the  circumstances  of 
their  lives,  so  sympathetically  indeed  that  he 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      159 

wrote  in  their  behalf  what  strikes  me  as  a  most 
deplorable  defence  of  the  tipping  system. 
Probably  no  foreigner  has  ever  known  the 
Graubiinden  as  he  knew  it,  historically,  geo- 
graphically, industrially,  and  humanly;  and 
one  of  his  long-cherished  schemes  was  to  write 
a  history  of  the  canton.  He  studied  the  cli- 
mate, and  wrote  voluminously  on  all  the  vari- 
ous kinds  of  avalanches  and  the  history  of 
memorable  avalanches.  And  just  as  he  had 
been  led  into  this  profound  sympathy  with  the 
Davos  peasantry,  so  now  he  began  to  study  the 
living  Italians.  During  the  spring  journey  to 
Venice  of  1881  he  formed  a  friendship  with 
Angelo  Fusatto  the  gondolier,  the  faithful  ser- 
vant and  companion  who  was  with  him  when 
he  died.  Through  Angelo  he  came  to  know 
with  an  equal  intimacy  the  familiar,  water-side 
life  of  Venice,  which  he  describes  in  The  Gon- 
dolier's Wedding  and  other  sketches.  He  cer- 
tainly did  not  have  the  faculty,  for  instance, 
of  Stevenson,  for  communicating  life  ©f  this 
kind  in  literature.  He  was  too  much  the  curi- 
ous student,  possibly,  with  a  touch  of  social 
conventionality;  but  there  is  no  doubt  of  the 


160  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

reality  of  his  fellow-feeling  in  all  such  adven- 
tures. 

All  this  came  about  at  the  first  through 
Christian  Buol.  Christian  enabled  him  to 
bring  into  practice  those  ideas  of  comrade- 
ship and  democracy  which  had  first  drawn  him 
to  Whitman.  For  Whitman  had  stirred  him 
chiefly  at  first  and  through  many  years  by  that 
indefinite  Platonic  poem  Calamus,  the  love  of 
comrades.  The  subject  is  extremely  complex 
in  relation  to  a  man  like  Symonds;  yet  per- 
haps I  can  do  something  towards  unravelling 
it.  It  is  clear  that  Whitman  draws  a  distinct 
line  between  "adhesiveness,"  or  the  love  of  man 
for  man,  and  "amativeness,"  or  the  love  of  the 
sexes.  The  sentiment,  or  rather  passion,  which 
he  tries  to  adumbrate  is  something  more  spirit- 
ual than  sexual  affection.  This  "manly  attach- 
ment," this  "athletic  love"  is  friendship  raised 
to  a  higher  power  and  conceived  as  the  welding 
force  of  human  democracy:  a  chivalrous  en- 
thusiasm like  that  of  soldiers  fighting  in  com- 
mon for  a  great  cause.  At  the  same  time  one 
feels  that  there  was  about  Whitman  some- 
thing "soft,"  a  something  associated  with  his 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      161 

notion  of  intimacy  that  strikes  a  false  note. 
This  again  is  an  extremely  complex  psycholog- 
ical point,  and  the  question  must  remain  at 
present  de  gustibus.  I  wish  only  to  indicate  a 
very  human  mental  reservation  from  what 
everyone  must  recognize  in  candor  as  a  truly 
sublime  idea.  It  is  enough  to  say  that  the 
Platonic  idea,  which  has  lately  been  a  good 
deal  flourished  about,  assumed  in  Whitman  a 
sentimental  form,  and  that  with  Symonds  it 
was  primarily  artistic.  How  obscure,  how  un- 
defined in  both  men  the  impulse  was  may  be 
judged  from  Whitman's  complaint  that  for 
twenty  years  in  letters  Symonds  had  been  pes- 
tering and  catechising  him  on  the  meaning  of 
Calamus.  "My  first  instinct  about  all  that 
Symonds  writes,"  he  said  to  Horace  Traubel, 
"is  violently  reactionary — is  strong  and  brutal 
for  no,  no,  no.  Then  the  thought  intervenes 
that  I  maybe  do  not  know  all  my  own  mean- 
ings." Plainly  it  could  not  be  reduced  to  the 
dialectical  form  of  the  Cliarmides;  and  as 
plainly,  dim  as  it  is,  it  cannot  be  ignored.  It 
takes  us  back  to  Symonds'  childhood  when,  to 
the  discomfort  of  his  father,  he  preferred  to 


162  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

fall  in  love  with  an  engraving  of  the  Genius 
of  the  Vatican  rather  than  with  "some  nymph 
or  Hebe."  It  accompanied  him  through  life 
in  his  passion  for  the  aesthetic  aspect  of  sports. 
It  formed  the  motive  of  a  large  number  of 
poems,  many  of  which  were  published  (Calli- 
crates,  for  instance,  a  copy  of  which  he  sent  to 
Whitman).  It  drew  him  uneasily  to  the  sub- 
ject of  Antinous,  that  beautiful,  equivocal  boy, 
an  emperor's  Ganymede.  In  his  essay,  on 
Athens  he  tests  it  by  the  theory  of  the  milieu. 
It  plays  its  part  in  his  physical  repulsion  from 
the  style  of  Pater  ("like  the  presence  of  a 
civet-cat")  and  again  where  he  speaks,  in  a 
letter  of  1878,  of  "something  in  the  personality 
of  Keats,  some  sort  of  semi-physical  aroma 
wafted  from  it,  which  I  cannot  endure."  The 
corollary  of  this  physical  repulsion,  which  is 
always  a  mark  of  neurotic  people,  is  found  in 
his  essay  on  Swiss  Athletic  Sports,  where  he 
quotes  the  remark  of  one  of  the  athletes, 
a  propos  of  the  brotherliness  of  gymnasts: 
"That  is  because  we  come  into  physical  contact 
with  one  another.  You  only  learn  to  love  men 
whose  bodies  you  have  touched  and  handled." 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      163 

Symonds'  comment  on  this  is,  "True  as  I  be- 
lieve this  remark  to  be,  and  wide-reaching  in 
its  possibilities  of  application,  I  somehow  did 
not  expect  it  from  the  lips  of  an  Alpine  peas- 
ant." 

This  question  belongs  to  the  mysterious 
depths  of  aesthetic  psychology.  I  must  only 
add  that  it  controlled  Symonds  in  almost 
every  issue,  that  it  led  him  into  Greek  studies, 
attracted  him  to  Whitman  and  the  Davos  peas- 
antry, and  certainly  explains  his  lifelong  en- 
thusiasm for  Michael  Angelo,  the  supreme  ar- 
tist of  the  adolescent  masculine  body.  And  in 
any  case  it  provides  us  with  a  superb  specimen 
of  that  philosophy  according  to  which  the  soul 
with  all  its  aspirations  and  activities  is  ex- 
plained by  physiology. 

The  friendship  of  Symonds  and  Whitman, 
though  they  never  met,  lasted  continuously  for 
nearly  thirty  years  until  the  death  of  Whitman 
in  1892.  Of  Whitman's  influence  on  Symonds' 
life  I  have  already  spoken  and  shall  have  oc- 
casion to  speak  later.  Of  the  nature  of  his 
work,  in  Symonds'  view,  perhaps  I  may  quote 
an  eloquent  though  somewhat  inflated  passage 


from  the  Study  of  Whitman,  published  on  the 
day  Symonds  died,  which  illustrates  alike  his 
power  and  misuse  of  words: 

"He  is  Behemoth,  wallowing  in  primeval 
jungles,  bathing  at  fountain-heads  of  mighty 
rivers,  crushing  the  bamboos  and  the  cane- 
brakes  under  him,  bellowing  and  exulting  in 
the  torrid  air.  He  is  a  gigantic  elk  or  buffalo, 
trampling  the  grasses  of  the  wilderness,  track- 
ing his  mate  with  irresistible  energy.  He  is  an 
immense  tree,  a  kind  of  Ygdrasil,  stretching 
its  roots  down  into  the  bowels  of  the  world,  and 
unfolding  its  magic  boughs  through  all  the 
space  of  the  heavens.  His  poems  are  even  as 
the  rings  in  a  majestic  oak  or  pine.  He  is  the 
circumambient  air,  in  which  float  shadowy 
shapes,  rise  mirage-towers  and  palm-groves; 
we  try  to  clasp  their  visionary  forms;  they  van- 
ish into  ether.  He  is  the  globe  itself;  all  seas, 
lands,  forests,  climates,  storms,  snows,  sun- 
shines, rains  of  universal  earth.  He  is  all  na- 
tions, cities,  languages,  religions,  arts,  creeds, 
thoughts,  emotions.  He  is  the  beginning  and 
the  grit  of  these  things,  not  their  endings,  lees, 
and  dregs.  Then  he  comes  to  us  as  lover,  con- 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      165 

soler,  physician,  nurse,  most  tender,  fatherly, 
sustaining  those  about  to  die,  lifting  the  chil- 
dren, and  stretching  out  his  arms  to  the  young 
men.  What  the  world  has  he  absorbs.  For 
him  there  is  no  schism  in  the  universe,  no  force 
opposed  to  God  or  capable  of  thwarting  Him, 
no  evil  ineradicable  by  the  soul,  no  limit  set  on 
human  aspiration.  Vice  and  disease  he  re- 
bukes and  pities.  They  are  tainted,  defective, 
miserable ;  yet  not  to  be  screamed  at ;  rather  to 
be  cured  and  healed.  He  knows  that  purity 
is  best,  and  health  is  best.  But  he  also  shows 
that  what  false  modesty  accounted  unclean  is 
the  cleanest  and  the  healthiest  of  all.  In  his 
return  to  nature  he  does  not  select  inanimate 
nature  or  single  out  the  savage  state.  He  takes 
man  first,  as  the  height  and  head  of  things ;  and 
after  man  the  whole  tract  that  human  feet  can 
traverse  or  human  thought  explore.  Cities, 
arts,  occupations,  manufactures,  have  a  larger 
place  in  his  poetry  than  rivers  or  prairies;  for 
these  are  nearer  to  man,  more  important  to  his 
destiny  and  education.  He  is  the  poet  of  fact, 
of  the  real,  of  what  exists,  of  the  last  true, 
positive,  and  sole  ontology." 


166  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

In  this  book  and  in  his  essay  on  Democratic 
Art  are  summed  up  Symonds'  views  on  Whit- 
man as  a  gigantic  spiritual  force. 

Whitman  in  his  turn  was  deeply  devoted  to 
Symonds.  His  first  real  recognition  came 
from  a  few  English  and  Irish  scholars,  and 
there  is  no  doubt  that  he  felt  not  only  grateful 
but  flattered.  The  great  man  was,  in  fact,  ab- 
surdly and  naively  vain.  He  enjoyed  the  ex- 
uberant praise  of  men,  so-called  of  culture, 
who  seemed  to  have  a  kind  of  divine  right  to 
speak  of  him  in  the  same  breath  with  Homer 
and  Dante.  He  did  not  stop  to  consider 
whether  they  themselves  were  little  or  big,  so 
long  as  they  satisfied  him  as  crown-makers  and 
weavers  of  laurel  for  him.  One  finds  his  atti- 
tude toward  Symonds,  as  it  is  now  revealed  in 
that  truly  great  work,  the  greatest  biographical 
work  in  American  literature,  With  Walt  Whit- 
man in  Camdcn,  in  all  ways  wholly  and  hu- 
manly delicious.  Some  of  the  tilings  he  said 
to  Horace  Traubel  are  in  clear,  disinterested 
praise  of  his  friend;  others  illustrate  his  un- 
conscionable habit  of  self-advertisement  and 
his  utilitarian  view  of  disciples;  all  exhibit  the 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      167 

American  dialect  and  aroma  of  the  man,  as 
strong  and  pervasive  as  the  Scottish  dialect 
and  aroma  of  Carlyle.  In  some  cases  the 
three  are  intermingled,  as  here: 

"Symonds  surely  has  style — do  you  notice? 
His  simplest  notes  are  graceful — hang  about 
sweetly  after  they  are  done — seem  to  be  heart- 
beats. I  am  very  fond  of  Symonds — often  re- 
gret that  we  have  never  met:  he  is  one  of  my 
real  evidences;  is  loyal,  unqualifying — never 
seems  ashamed — never  draws  back — never 
seems  to  be  asking  himself,  Have  I  made  a 
mistake  in  this  Walt  Whitman? 
Symonds  has  got  into  our  crowd  in  spite  of 
his  culture;  I  tell  you  we  don't  give  away 
places  in  our  crowd  easy — a  man  has  to  sweat 
to  get  in." 

And  again: 

"Symonds  is  a  royal  good  fellow — he  comes 
along  without  qualifications;  just  happens  into 
the  temple  and  takes  his  place." 

And  again  when,  as  it  appears,  Professor 
Dowden's  first  enthusiasm  seemed  to  be  letting 
up  a  little: 


168  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

"Symonds  is  a  persistent  fire;  he  never  quails 
or  lowers  his  colors." 

Symonds,  who  did  not  consider  his  admira- 
tion for  Whitman  in  the  light  of  propaganda, 
was  a  little  nettled  by  just  this  aspect  of  the 
matter;  but  he  had  the  good  sense  to  overlook 
it.  And  indeed  Whitman,  who  viewed  his  own 
cult  almost  as  a  disinterested  worshipper,  could 
return  compliments  in  his  own  queer  way: 

"Symonds  could  crowd  all  the  literary  fel- 
lows off  the  stage  for  delicacy — directness— 
of  pure  literary  expression ;  yes,  honest  expres- 
sion. Symonds  is  cultivated  enough  to  break 
—bred  to  the  last  atom — overbred;  yet  he  has 
remained  human,  a  man,  in  spite  of  all." 

"Symonds  is  a  craftsman  of  the  first  water 
—pure  as  crystal — fine,  fine,  fine — dangerously 
near  the  superfine  in  his  weaker  moments." 

And  how  he  felt  toward  Symonds  personally 
may  be  gathered  from  the  following: 

"I  am  always  strangely  moved  by  a  letter 
from  Symonds;  it  makes  the  day,  it  makes 
many  days,  sacred." 

"He  is  surely  a  wonderful  man — a  rare, 
cleaned-up  man — a  white-souled,  heroic  char- 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      169 

acter.  I  have  had  my  own  troubles — but 
Symonds  is  the  noblest  of  us  all." 

"On  the  whole  I  do  not  regret  that  I  never 
got  to  Europe,  but  occasionally  it  comes  over 
me  that  Symonds  is  alive — that  we  have  never 
met ;  then  I  want  to  drop  everything  and  start 
at  once." 

And  in  one  other  passage  he  seems  to  assign 
Symonds  the  chief  seat  in  what  he  called  the 
temple : 

"I  suppose  Symonds  must  always  be  first; 
his  loyalty  takes  such  an  ardent  personal  form ; 
it  has  not  the  literary  tang,  except  incidentally. 
.  .  .  With  Symonds  everything  is  down — 
we  are  face  to  face." 

In  1883  appeared  Shdkspere's  Predeces- 
sors in  the  English  Drama.  Between  1862  and 
1865,  before  definitely  resolving  to  enter  liter- 
ature, he  had  begun  as  a  private  exercise  a  his- 
tory of  the  Elizabethan  drama.  He  did  not 
abandon  the  scheme  for  many  years,  and  seems 
to  have  intended  to  incorporate  the  work  in 
that  history  of  the  English  Renaissance  which 
we  find  him  discussing  as  late  as  1870  with 
Jowett,  who  urged  him  to  undertake  it  in  a 


170  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

severely  historical  spirit.  A  mass  of  material 
was  collected  and  many  written  essays  and 
fragments  were  stored  away  in  his  "desolation 
box";  out  of  which  at  intervals  came  his  life  of 
Jonson.,  his  General  Introduction  to  the  Mer- 
maid Series  (1887),  and  his  introductions  to 
the  Mermaid  editions  of  Heywood  and  Web- 
ster and  Tourneur  (1888).  Feeling  that  he 
was  improperly  prepared  and  cut  off  from 
sources  of  adequate  investigation,  he  hesitated 
to  enter  a  field  where  so  many  eminent  scholars 
were  at  work.  And  he  would  probably  never 
have  resumed  these  early  studies  had  he  not 
been  urged  to  do  so  by  his  nephew  St.  Loe 
Strachey  in  1882,  at  a  time  when  his  Italian 
studies  were  practically  finished. 

The  Elizabethan  drama  attracted  Symonds 
first  through  his  favorite  paradox  that  it  was 
strongly  anti-literary.  Like  Cellini's  Memoirs 
it  was  a  native,  uncultivated  growth,  produced 
in  sympathy  with  the  whole  people,  demo- 
cratic. Secondly,  it  appealed  to  his  critical 
sense  as  one  of  the  few  examples  in  the  his- 
tory of  art  of  a  complete,  organic  whole,  a 
spontaneous  illustration  of  a  people's  growth, 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      171 

unhampered  by  academies  or  by  ecclesiastical 
censorship — a  free  record  of  racial  evolution. 
Shakspere's  Predecessors  is  therefore  per- 
haps the  best  example  of  Symonds'  critical 
philosophy,  as  that  is  indicated  in  his  Essays 
Speculative  and  Suggestive.  His  attempt  was 
to  apply  in  England  the  method  of  Taine— 
"the  steady  determination  to  regard  all  sub- 
jects of  enquiry  from  the  point  of  view  of  de- 
velopment." At  the  same  time  he  found  in 
Taine  "a  something  inconsistent  with  the 
subtlety  of  nature" — something  not  quite 
pragmatic,  as  wre  should  say.  He  believed 
that  English  criticism  would  run  little  danger 
of  carrying  method  and  logic  too  far,  little 
danger  of  running  to  excess  in  the  uncongenial 
task  of  "shifting  the  centre  of  gravity  from 
men  as  personalities  to  men  as  exponents  of 
their  race  and  age."  The  Carlylean  idea  of 
great  men,  so  much  more  characteristic  of 
English  criticism,  would  provide  a  sufficient 
makeweight  to  prevent  that.  In  the  English 
drama,  like  the  Greek  sculpture,  like  Italian 
painting,  he  found  one  of  those  truly  national 
types  of  art  "which  have  occupied  the  serious 


JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

attention  of  whole  peoples  for  considerable 
periods,"  and  which  thus  enabled  him  to  apply 
admirably  the  test  of  the  milieu. 

The  style  of  this  book  was  a  great  affliction 
to  Churton  Collins,  who  made  it  the  object  of 
a  stately  anathema  in  The  Quarterly  Review. 
He  found  in  it  "every  indication  of  precipitous 
haste,  a  style  which  where  it  differs  from  the 
style  of  extemporary  journalism  differs  for 
the  worse — florid,  yet  commonplace;  full  of 
impurities;  inordinately,  nay,  incredibly,  dif- 
fuse and  pleonastic;  a  narrative  clogged  with 
endless  repetitions,  without  symmetry,  with- 
out proportion."  Among  the  guilty  phrases 
which  he  attributes  to  the  school  of  Swinburne 
is  Symonds'  characterization  of  one  play  as 
"an  asp,  short,  ash-colored,  poison- fanged, 
blunt-headed,  abrupt  in  movement,  hissing  and 
wriggling  through  the  sands  of  human  mis- 
ery." But  how  can  it  be  asserted  that  Symonds 
was  in  any  way  a  follower  of  Swinburne? 
Phrases  like  this  are,  after  all,  matters  of  tem- 
perament. They  are  not  classical;  but  they 
are  far  more  consonant  with  the  Elizabethan 
manner  and  the  most  nervous,  native  English 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      173 

than  is  the  style  approved  by  Collins.  And 
they  confirm  the  oft-suggested  affinity  between 
Elizabethan  and  Victorian  literature. 

Throughout  the  year  1881  he  had  suffered 
from  a  more  than  usual  depression,  crushing 
fatigue,  and  morbid  restlessness.  This  was  ex- 
plained by  a  visit  to  England  in  May,  1882. 
Before  leaving  Davos  he  wrote,  "My  life 
seems  to  have  become  suddenly  hollow,  and  I 
do  not  know  what  is  hanging  over  me."  In 
London  he  was  examined  by  Dr.  Clark  and 
Dr.  Williams,  both  of  whom  independently 
pronounced  that  the  rifjfht  lung  was  now  ac- 
tively affected  as  well  as  the  left  and  had  been 
so  for  at  least  a  year.  It  was  a  deadly  blow 
to  all  his  hopes  and  expectations,  for  he  had 
reasoned  himself  through  all  difficulties  in  the 
belief  that  Davos  was  gradually  curing  his  dis- 
ease. Other  trials  befell.  In  March,  1882,  his 
dear  friend  and  brother-in-law  Professor 
Green  died.  His  sister  Lady  Strachey  died. 
His  daughter  Janet  fell  ill,  more  and  more 
hopelessly.  Davos  had  lost  its  novelty  and  the 
allurement  of  promised  health.  Isolation 
preyed  upon  him,  and  he  felt  the  pathological 


174  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

nature  of  that  access  of  youthful  spirits  which 
accompanied  the  progress  of  his  disease. 
Davos,  he  told  a  friend,  made  him  "quarrel- 
some and  conceited."  Constant  attacks  of 
fever  kept  him  shut  up  in  his  bedroom  with 
ice-bags  on  his  head.  But  energy  and  cour- 
age— themselves  without  doubt  symptoms  and 
effects  of  his  malady — never  failed  him.  "I 
want  to  tell  you,"  he  writes  out  of  the  depth 
of  his  miseries,  "that  my  theory  of  existence  is 
to  sustain  the  spiritual,  the  energetic,  the  re- 
joicing element  in  self  alive,  as  the  one  great 
duty  to  the  world,  the  one  function  for  which 
a  man  was  framed";  and  he  brings  to  mind 
Branwell  Bronte,  who  died  upright  on  his  feet. 
He  took  to  reading  James  Thomson,  whose 
absolutely  rayless  pessimism  satisfied  his  own 
black  broodings.  Yet  it  is  noticeable  that  he 
breaks  off  a  letter  on  Thomson  to  tell  about 
the  international  toboggan  race  which  is  oc- 
curring at  Davos  and  for  which  he  wishes  to 
provide  a  cup:  £15  is  to  be  the  cost  of  it, 
and  he  desires  a  solid,  old-fashioned  college 
tankard. 

Often   he   would   join   a   singing-party   of 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      175 

young  and  old  men,  or  would  go  driving  with 
his  family  for  days  together  among  the  moun- 
tain villages.  At  home  the  routine  of  work 
occupied  him  till  two  or  three  in  the  morning. 
Sitting  in  his  study,  with  its  carpet  chair  and 
the  cast  of  Cellini's  Perseus  upright  on  the 
serpentine  stove,  he  was  ready  at  all  hours  for 
a  smoke  and  talk  with  the  Davos  natives, 
whose  counsellor  he  was.  Late  at  night  he 
would  go  tobogganing  in  the  moonlight  or 
walk,  dreaming  and  speculating,  along  the 
shore  of  the  frozen  lake  and  among  the  pines. 
The  air  of  the  Alps  induced  more  and  more 
constantly  in  his  thought  that  mystical  cosmic 
enthusiasm  which  was  to  him  the  divine  idea. 
"We  crave  to  lose  self,"  he  writes,  "or  to  real- 
ize it  all  by  merging  it.  We  want  to  burn  in- 
definitely, infinitely,  inimitably,  everlastingly  . 
upwards.  There  are  potentialities  in  all  of  us 
"of  which  we  are  aware,  which  we  need  to  bring 
into  this  incandescence."  That  spiritual  mood 
certainly  is  very  closely  allied  to  the  hectic 
stimulation  of  tuberculosis.  Everywhere  in 
Symonds  the  mental,  moral,  and  physical 
spring  from  a  transparently  common  source: 


176  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

there  is  not,  as  in  so  many  men,  a  deceptive 
separation  of  faculties.  In  the  same  way  are 
to  be  explained  those  outbreaks  of  high  spirits 
during  which  he  was  the  Horace  of  so  many 
peasant  wine- festivals — mirth-making  as  Hor- 
ace and  a  good  deal  more  hilarious.  How 
exotically  braced  his  vitality  was  may  be  gath- 
ered from  his  habits  of  mountain  climbing. 
One  night  he  walked  by  moonlight  up  the 
Schwartzhorn,  reaching  the  top  just  before 
dawn :  nor  was  this  expedition  exceptional. 

His  isolation  was  broken  by  a  diary  of  news 
and  reflections,  dispatched  each  month  by 
Henry  Sidgwick,  which  brought  him  word  of 
the  stirring  intellectual  world  of  England. 
Yet  this  only  confirmed  his  own  sense  of  hav- 
ing no  niche,  no  remembered  place  among  his 
contemporaries.  He  consoled  himself  by  feel- 
ing that  he  had  risen  above  literature  and  had 
thereby  become  a  more  integral  and  contribu- 
tory part  in  the  sheer  life-force.  "I  have 
thrown  off  ambition  and  abandoned  litera- 
ture," he  writes  on  Christmas  day,  1884.  .  .  . 
"I  am  so  very  stupid,  so  proved  thricefold 
stupid  by  my  acknowledged  and  obvious  fail- 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      177 

lire  in  the  work  I  chose,  that  I  cannot  give 
the  least  rational  account  of  what  I  expect 
from  this  Future.  Only  I  will  not  take  from 
its  hands  what  I  have  asked  from  the  past- 
literary  success  and  literary  hearing.  I  de- 
mand from  the  Future  something  finer,  some- 
thing that  concerns  the  naked  soul."  And 
again:  "I  am  weary  of  things  that  seem  to 
me  so  infinitely  nugatory,  face  to  face  with 
mere  human  suffering.  And  so  far  as  any 
energy  is  left  in  me,  I  strive  now  to  spend 
my  force  (of  will,  and  thought,  and  purse) 
in  smoothing  paths  for  happier  people  than 
myself.  I  have  many  opportunities  here." 

Of  these  opportunities  he  made  the  most. 
Feeling,  writh  some  misgivings,  however,  that 
his  large  family  of  daughters  made  it  neces- 
sary for  him  to  keep  intact  his  inherited  capi- 
tal, he  reduced  his  personal  expenses  to  a  mini- 
mum and  made  a  practice  of  devoting  all  the 
proceeds  of  his  literary  work  and  everything 
else  that  could  be  spared  from  his  other  income 
to  the  welfare  of  Davos  and  his  friends  there. 
He  certainly  lacked  the  sociological  imagina- 
tion ;  he  knew  nothing  of  economics  and  seems 


178  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

never  to  have  realized  the  true  bearings  of 
wealth.  He  did  not  grasp  anything  beyond 
a  personal  campaign;  but  this  he  carried  out 
with  admirable  science  and  unselfishness.  It 
gave  him  an  incentive  to  work  when  every 
other  incentive  failed  him,  and  the  skill  and 
energy  involved  in  schemes  of  practical  affec- 
tion invigorated  him.  He  concocted  all  sorts 
of  ingenious  measures  to  bring  about,  imper- 
sonally and  secretly,  a  balance  of  opportunity 
between  himself  and  those  who  were  poorer 
than  he:  studying  private  cases  where  men 
could  be  helped  to  develop  their  proper  facul- 
ties and  circumventing  by  all  sorts  of  diplo- 
matic wiles  the  obstacles  of  conventional  pride. 
His  attitude  toward  poverty  and  himself  in 
relation  to  poverty  exhibits  in  its  best  aspect — 
both  of  heart  and  head — the  old-fashioned 
philanthropic  idea. 

Yet  for  a  comparatively  popular  writer  his 
earnings  were  not  large.  At  the  end  of  1885, 
when  he  had  arranged  to  publish  the  Catholic 
Reaction,  he  estimated  that  his  total  returns 
for  the  seven  volumes  of  The  Renaissance  in 
Italy  amounted  only  to  £1100,  the  remunera- 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      179 

tion  for  eleven  years  of  steady,  devoted  labor; 
at  least  half  of  which  had  gone  into  books  and 
traveling  expenses  without  which  the  work 
wrould  have  been  impossible.  Although  this 
income  was,  of  course,  largely  supplemented 
from  his  other  books  and  articles — mainly,  no 
doubt,  those  which  cost  him  the  least  time  and 
effort — it  remains  that  <£50  a  year  had  been 
his  average  receipts  from  a  work  which  had 
involved  his  best  energies,  which  had  been  the 
fruit  of  many  unremunerative  years  of  study, 
and  was  undoubtedly  a  popular  classic  in  its 
line. 

The  year  1886  was  the  most  productive  in 
all  Symonds'  career  as  man  of  letters.  He 
published  the  two  final  volumes  of  The  Re- 
naissance; translated  the  whole  of  Cellini's 
Memoirs;  wrote  his  life  of  Sidney  for  the 
English  Men  of  Letters,  his  life  of  Jonson 
for  the  English  Worthies,  and  his  article  on 
Tasso  for  the  Encyclopaedia  Britannica;  and 
edited  Sir  Thomas  Browne  and  Selections 
from  Jonson.  Most  of  this  was  merely  the 
quick  and  sufficiently  competent  work  of  an 
expert  in  a  single  literary  period,  who  could 


180  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

patch  together  in  very  short  order  an  adequate 
monograph  or  popular  edition.  He  had  cov- 
ered the  ground  many  times  before.  Yet,  with 
any  but  a  pure  hack-writer,  the  choice  of 
themes  is  never  accidental — it  is  in  itself 
highly  characteristic;  and  in  Sidney  and  Jon- 
son  we  may  find  special  affinities  with  Sy- 
monds  which,  with  numerous  others  elsewhere, 
in  the  aggregate  determined  his  general  major 
sympathy  with  the  Renaissance. 

It  is  not  fanciful  to  see  how  naturally  he 
was  drawn  to  Sir  Philip  Sidney — "the  very 
essence  of  congruity,"  as  Wotton  said — when 
his  own  soul  had  been  for  so  many  years  the 
very  quintessence  of  incongruity.  And  re- 
membering his  favorite  doctrine  that  life  is 
more  than  literature  and  his  own  powerless- 
ness  to  subdue  the  furor  scribcndi,  we  may 
fancy  with  what  half-envious  satisfaction  he 
recalled  Fulke  Greville's  opinion  of  his  com- 
rade that  "his  end  was  not  writing,  even  while 
he  wrote."  So  when  he  observes:  "The  whole 
tenor  of  Sidney's  career  proves  his  determina- 
tion to  subordinate  self-culture  of  every  kind 
to  the  ruling  purpose  of  useful  public  ac- 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      181 

tion" — when  he  writes  this  we  know  that  he 
was  putting  on  paper  the  cherished  ideal  of 
his  own,  which  Davos  partially  enabled  him  to 
realize. 

So,  also,  in  Ben  Jonson  he  found  a  man 
freighted  with  learning  who  could  breathe  and 
exert  beneath  it  the  free  will  of  his  personal- 
ity, who  could  be  monumentally  a  scholar  and 
yet  remain  essentially  an  artist.  And  when 
he  says,  "It  would  not  be  impossible,  I  think, 
to  regard  Jonson's  genius  as  originally  of  the 
romantic  order,  overlaid  and  diverted  from  its 
spontaneous  bias  by  a  scholar's  education,  and 
by  definite  theories  of  the  poet's  task,  deliber- 
ately adopted  and  tenaciously  adhered  to  in 
middle  life" — we  can  see  again  that  he  writes 
with  one  eye  on  his  own  career.  It  is  this  kind 
of  slip,  or  hazard,  or  half -confession  which 
makes  the  critical  writings  of  Symonds  never 
quite  passionlessly,  objectively  true,  and  al- 
ways abundantly  autobiographical.  Incident- 
ally his  admiration  for  Jonson  leads  him  into 
a  very  unjust  comparison  with  Dry  den.  A 
"parasite  of  public  caprice  .  .  .  impudently 
confessing  his  mean  and  servile  aims"  is  not 


182  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

the  whole  truth  about  the  author  of  that  ques- 
tionable line,  "To  please  the  people  ought  to 
be  the  poet's  aim."  It  is  worth  noting  as  the 
only  radically  and  deliberately  unfair  criticism 
I  have  found  anywhere  in  his  writings. 

The  translation  of  Cellini  was  more  impor- 
tant. It  is  probably  the  most  popular  of  all 
Symonds'  works;  and  work  of  his  it  is  by  vir- 
tue of  its  style.  Here  he  had  to  reproduce 
the  "heedless  animated  talk"  of  a  racy  char- 
acter, ignorant  of  literature,  often  ungram- 
matical,  but  invariably  sharp-witted,  humor- 
ous, lively,  direct.  Symonds  has  made  an 
English  classic  of  the  book  which  Goethe 
naturalized  in  German  and  Comte  thought 
worthy  as  a  human  document  of  a  place  in 
the  Positivist  Library.  The  style  of  his  ver- 
sion has  all  the  nervous  vitality,  the  mother- 
wit,  the  native  idiom  of  the  great  Elizabethan 
translations:  it  is  a  masterpiece  of  literary 
archaeology,  electrically  alive.  The  labor  spent 
in  close  intimacy  with  this  book,  coinciding 
with  his  own  increasing  sense  of  actuality,  his 
ever-growing  delight  in  human  nature,  had  its 
effect  on  all  his  later  work.  To  it  I  trace,  for 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      183 

instance,  the  realism  and  vigor  of  his  Auto- 
biography, written  three  years  later  and  re- 
garded by  him  as  the  most  successful  of  his 
writings.  And  indeed  almost  all  that  he  pro- 
duced in  later  life  had  in  style  some  of  that 
homely  strength  which  is  the  genius  of  native 
English  prose. 

To  Symonds  Cellini  was  a  sort  of  human 
touchstone  for  the  Renaissance — a  man  who 
expressed  in  action  the  whole  age,  its  pagan- 
ism, its  brutality,  its  piety,  its  superstition,  its 
sensibility,  its  curiosity,  its  passion  for  beauty. 
He  lived  "in  the  Whole,"  and  thus  fulfilled  at 
least  that  third  of  Goethe's  maxim  which  is 
the  most  inaccessible  to  modern  complex  men. 
The  place  that  this  translation  holds  among 
Symonds'  Renaissance  studies  is  indicated  by 
a  passage  from  his  own  Introduction  to  it: 
"It  is  the  first  book  which  a  student  of  the 
Renaissance  should  handle  in  order  to  obtain 
the  right  direction  for  his  more  minute  re- 
searches. It  is  the  last  book  to  which  he 
should  return  at  the  close  of  his  exploratory 
voyages.  At  the  commencement  he  will  find 
it  invaluable  for  placing  him  at  the  exactly 


184  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

proper  point  of  view.  At  the  end  he  will  find 
it  no  less  invaluable  for  testing  and  verifying 
the  conclusions  he  has  drawn  from  various 
sources  and  a  wide  circumference  of  learning. 
.  .  .  His  Memoirs  enable  us  to  comprehend 
how  those  rarer  products  of  the  Italian  genius 
at  a  certain  point  of  evolution  were  related  to 
the  common  stuff  of  human  nature  in  the  race 
at  large."  This  indicates  the  importance  and 
charm  of  the  book  to  Symonds.  And  there 
were  more  personal  reasons  to  be  explained 
by  that  peculiar  admiration  of  Symonds  for 
everything  directly  opposite  to  himself.  Cel- 
lini was  objective  and  external,  healthy, 
natural,  free  from  introspection  and  incapable 
of  brooding,  a  lover  of  form  rather  than  color, 
a  hater  of  "that  accursed  music,"  a  man  of 
action. 

May  it  not  also  be  said  that,  like  all  true 
artists,  Cellini  was  an  ideal  man?  Transgress- 
ing every  moral  law,  he  erred  only  in  relation 
to  the  social  background — and  it  is  the  task  of 
society,  not  of  the  individual,  to  provide  the 
proper  background:  living  in  the  ideal  society 
Cellini  would  have  responded  with  equal  ful- 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      185 

ness,  mutatis  mutandis,,  to  ideal  conditions, 
since  he  was  one  of  those  men  who  accept  life 
unreservedly  as  they  find  it.  The  important 
thing  to  remember,  and  the  thing  which  makes 
all-expressive  human  nature  always  ideal,  is, 
that  it  can  with  spiritual — or,  in  Cellini's  case, 
artistic — integrity  accept  life  whole-heartedly 
and  glorify  it.  That  ideal  faculty  of  the  in- 
dividual is  society's  chief  earnest,  society's 
chief  incentive  to  provide  the  proper  back- 
ground. And  if,  as  John  Stuart  Mill  says, 
the  peril  which  threatens  the  world  is  a  de- 
ficiency of  personal  impulses  and  preferences, 
then  it  is  easy  to  understand  why  the  Memoirs 
of  this  immortal  ruffian  was  regarded  by 
Goethe  and  Comte  as  among  the  few  all- 
important  human  records. 

It  is  astonishing  to  find  Symonds  amid  the 
overwhelming  work  of  this  year — eight  vol- 
umes, either  seen  through  the  press,  written, 
edited,  or  translated — still  energetically  climb- 
ing, exploring,  traveling.  In  September  he 
made  a  tour  of  several  days  with  his  wife 
through  the  Lower  Engadine  and  the  Splii- 
gen.  But  the  strain  had  been  too  great.  His 


186  JOHN  AUDINGTON  SYMONDS 

eyes  gave  way,  he  fell  into  another  period  of 
depression,  his  old  habits  of  speculation  and 
introspection  came  back,  aggravated  by  his 
want  of  power  to  work.  And  in  the  midst  of 
all  this  distress  his  eldest  daughter  Janet  died, 
on  April  7,  1887.  Only  a  month  before  he 
had  written  to  Henry  Sidgwick,  "a  sublime 
system  of  ethics  seems  to  me  capable  of  being 
based  upon  that  hope  of  extinction."  And 
now  at  this  critical  moment  he  seemed  able  to 
prove  for  himself  that  love  does  not  require 
the  "bribe  of '  immortality." 

During  these  years  his  old  master  Jowett 
had  been  in  constant  touch  with  him,  spurring 
him  on  in  letters  and  occasionally  visiting  him 
in  his  solitude.  On  March  2  he  writes: 

"I  was  very  glad  to  hear  that  you  thought 
of  having  a  period  of  retirement  from  litera- 
ture and  of  rest  and  thought  before  you  pub- 
lish again.  It  is  the  only  way  to  gain  strength 
and  escape  from  mannerism.  You  have  great 
stores  of  knowledge  and  a  wonderful  facility 
and  grace  of  style.  But  I  want  you  to  write 
something  stronger  and  better,  and  in  which 
the  desire  to  get  at  the  truth  is  more  distinctly 


SWISS  LIFE:  WHITMAN      187 

expressed.  You  told  me  once  that  some  words 
of  mine  produced  a  great  impression  on  your 
'green,  untutored  youth.'  Let  me  add,  what 
I  am  equally  convinced  of,  that  you  may  not 
only  'rise  to  eminence' — that  is  already  ac- 
complished— but  that  you  have  natural  gifts 
which  would  place  you  among  the  first  of 
English  contemporary  writers,  if  you  studied 
carefully  how  to  use  them." 

And  a  letter  of  March  30  contains  this  sen- 
tence : 

"I  have  no  doubt  that  if  you  could  concen- 
trate yourself  and  have  a  couple  of  years' 
average  health,  you  might  leave  a  name  that 
would  not  be  forgotten  in  literature." 

Jowett,  it  may  be  said,  had  accepted  as  well 
as  given  advice,  for  it  was  through  Symonds 
that  he  was  led  to  undertake  the  four  years' 
task  of  revising  his  Plato. 


CHAPTER  VII 
LAST  YEARS:  DEATH 

THE  period  of  retirement  from  literature 
was  more  apparent  than  real.  Symonds 
for  two  years  published  no  fresh  book,  but  the 
more  inglorious  phase  of  his  craft  went  on  as 
usual.  After  a  brief  spring  visit  in  England 
he  returned  in  July,  1887,  to  the  drudgery  of 
the  Cellini  proofs,  a  five  months'  labor,  at  the 
same  time  reducing  to  system  his  aesthetic 
principles  in  a  series  of  papers  that  were  sub- 
sequently published  as  Essays  Speculative  and 
Suggestive.  And  an  autumn  visit  to  Venice, 
coinciding  with  the  great  success  of  his  Cel- 
lini, determined  him  to  translate  the  Memoirs 
of  Count  Carlo  Gozzi,  the  eighteenth  century 
Venetian  playwright. 

Gozzi  continued  to  occupy  him  through 
1888,  with  ever-diminishing  enthusiasm.  His 
heart  was  never  in  it,  he  said.  In  a  moment 

188 


LAST  YEARS:  DEATH         189 

of  light  fascination  he  had  engaged  himself 
to  the  year-long  company  of  the  Venetians  in 
their  most  corrupt,  glittering,  tawdry  period 
with,  for  daily  converse,  what  he  calls  "an  odd 
unsympathetic  bastard  between  Don  Quixote 
and  a  pettifogging  attorney":  certainly  a  dis- 
illusioning postscript  to  his  Renaissance 
studies. 

Although  it  became  presently  evident  as  the 
year  wore  on  that  the  physical  basis  of  his  life 
was  very  gradually  beginning  to  ebb  away,  he 
grew  nervously  and  in  human  intercourse 
more  and  more  active.  He  received  visits 
from  Jowett  and  his  old  friends  Arthur  Sidg- 
wick,  H.  G.  Dakyns,  and  Horatio  F.  Brown. 
His  correspondence  had  enormously  increased 
with  his  growing  fame  and  had  brought  him 
into  touch  especially  with  the  younger  genera- 
tion of  English  men  of  letters,  with  scholars 
in  Italy,  France,  and  Germany,  and  with  the 
circle  of  Whitman's  admirers  in  America.  As 
President  of  the  Davos  Turnverein  he  was  all- 
responsible  middleman  between  the  natives 
and  the  foreign  colony.  He  had  already  con- 
tributed much  to  the  building  of  a  gymna- 


190  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

sium,  and  in  1889  he  offered  to  give  10,000 
francs  to  clear  it  of  debt  and  place  it  in  the 
hands  of  the  commune,  reserving  to  the  Turn- 
vcrein  the  right  of  special  use.  It  was  only 
after  a  general  meeting  of  the  communal  as- 
sembly and  many  intricate  negotiations  that 
the  burghers  were  prevailed  upon  to  accept  it. 
"I  never  got  rid  of  £400  with  more  diplo- 
macy," said  Symonds.  In  the  summer  of  1888 
he  was  chosen  as  one  of  the  three  delegates 
from  the  University  of  Oxford  to  the  eleventh 
centenary  of  the  University  of  Bologna. 
"With  me,"  he  writes,  "life  burns  ever  more 
intense,  as  my  real  strength  wanes  and  my 
days  decrease.  It  seems  to  me  sometimes 
awful — the  pace  at  which  I  live  in  feeling — 
inversely  to  the  pace  at  which  myself  is  ebbing 
to  annihilation.  ...  I  never  seem  to  have 
lived  until  quite  lately." 

During  the  winter  of  1887-88  the  snow  fell 
in  the  Highlands  in  quantities  exceeding  all 
recorded  seasons.  Six  hundred  avalanches 
fell,  thirteen  lives  were  lost,  one  hundred  and 
seventy-two  buildings  wrecked.  Symonds, 
who,  like  Cowper,  had  an  "awful  admiration" 


LAST  YEARS:  DEATH         191 

for  great  storms,  was  deeply  stirred  by  the 
experience.  He  had  come,  as  he  said,  to  "love 
the  sternest  things  in  life  best,"  and  storms, 
he  wrote  two  years  later,  are  "the  kind  of 
things  which  do  the  soul  good:  like  most  of 
the  disturbances  of  nature."  In  a  season  like 
this  he  felt  the  culmination  of  that  intensity 
of  upper  mountain  air,  that  sense  of  abiding 
universal  relations  to  which  his  own  shattered 
mind  had  moored  itself.  His  impressions  of 
the  winter  and  of  his  thrilling  journey  south- 
ward to  Venice  with  his  daughter  Margaret 
through  the  whirling  April  snow  are  told  in 
his  essay,  Snow,  Frost,  Storm,  and  Avalanche. 
Driving  over  thirty  feet  of  snow  they  could 
touch  the  telegraph  wires.  All  traces  of  the 
road  were  obliterated.  "Now  we  must  trust 
to  the  horse,"  observed  the  postillion;  "if  he 
misses,  it  is  over  with  us."  Even  the  sledge 
bells  had  been  left  behind  lest  their  faintest 
tinkling  should  dislodge  an  avalanche.  In 
Venice  they  settled  in  an  apartment  which 
Symonds  had  engaged  for  a  term  of  years  in 
the  house  of  H.  F.  Brown.  How  much  he 
enjoyed  his  visits  in  Venice,  full  of  amusing 


192  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

adventures  among  the  water-dwelling  folk 
with  whose  ways  he  had  become  familiar  by 
long  training  among  corresponding  types  in 
Switzerland,  may  be  seen  from  his  Venetian 
sketches.  As  a  man  he  was  certainly  much 
more  at  home  in  scenes  of  this  kind  than  as  a 
writer.  The  free  gaiety,  the  sensuous  charm 
of  Italian  life  showed  him  how  starved  he  had 
been  on  certain  sides  in  his  icebound  retreat 
and  how  much  his  feverish  brain-activity  had 
resulted  from  the  congestion  of  a  naturally 
expansive  nature. 

In  March,  1889,  he  began  to  write  his  Auto- 
biography. This  work,  which  covered  mi- 
nutely his  early  years  and  analyzed  his  later 
intellectual  progress,  has  never  been  com- 
pletely published,  although  it  forms  the 
groundwork  of  the  great  biography  by  H.  F. 
Brown.  Certainly  it  strikes  a  tone  almost  con- 
sistently dark,  and  one  of  his  closest  friends 
maintained  that  he  had  given  an  "entirely 
wrong  account  of  himself"  and  that  the  lova- 
ble, bright,  gay,  enthusiastic  man  known  to 
his  friends  in  conversation  did  not  appear  at 
all.  Symonds  himself  lamented  that  one  can 


LAST  YEARS:  DEATH         193 

appear  so  differently  to  others  than  to  oneself. 
Without  doubt  he  succeeded  in  presenting 
faithfully  the  image  in  his  own  mirror:  only 
the  social  phase  was  lacking — all  that  is  called 
up  in  company.  And  it  is  a  question  whether, 
in  so  complex  a  nature,  it  may  be  said  with 
more  truth  that  happiness  or  unhappiness  was 
the  predominating  fact.  f  The  Autobiography, 
considered  by  him  the  most  successful  of  his 
writings,  is  notable  for  concrete  attention  to 
fact,  cool  deduction,  calm,  direct,  unwavering 
style,  and  general  objectivity,  j 

These  traits  of  strength  are  apparent  also 
in  the  Essays  Speculative  and  Suggestive, 
issued  in  1890.  "This,"  he  wrote  in  a  letter, 
"is  in  many  ways  the  most  important  book  I 
have  written  for  publication."  And  again: 
"I  am  interested  in  this  book  more  than  I  have 
been  in  any  other."  It  was  natural,  for  he  had 
put  on  record  his  reasoned  convictions  in  all 
the  lines  of  thought  which  had  occupied  his 
life — philosophy,  religion,  criticism,  art,  style. 
He  regarded  it  as  the  fruit  of  a  long  and  con- 
scious self -discipline  towards  wisdom,  during 
which  he  had  ruthlessly  cut  away  personal  am- 


194  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

bition  and  liberated  himself  from  the  bondage 
of  words.  For  once  he  stood  before  the  pub- 
lic with  mind  unveiled,  as  a  sheer  thinker,  not 
a  man  of  letters.  It  is  a  revelation  almost 
equally  of  strength  and  weakness — strong  as 
an  earnest  of  the  man's  power  of  self-conquest 
and  sincerity  of  principle,  weak  as  an  absolute 
contribution  to  thought.  For  the  eminence  of 
Symonds  is  based  upon  certain  extra-intellec- 
tual qualities,  sympathy,  style,  impression- 
ableness;  and  as  often  happens  when  these 
are  shorn  away  or  reduced  to  their  lowest  com- 
mon factor,  the  result  is  commonplace.  Sy- 
monds was  primarily  an  artist,  and  few  artists, 
when  all  the  glamour  of  the  soul  falls  from 
them,  can  contribute  anything  very  serious  to 
pure  thought.  So  here:  although  he  believed 
he  was  breaking  fresh  ground,  it  was  fresh 
mainly  as  regards  himself;  and  although  he 
considered  some  of  his  deductions  almost  reck- 
lessly in  advance  of  his  time,  there  must  be 
few  readers  to  whom  they  are  not  elaborate 
truisms.  It  is  certainly  a  truism  that  the  phi- 
losophy of  evolution  instead  of  routing  the 
religious  aspirations  of  men  has  reanimated 


LAST  YEARS:  DEATH         195 

our  spiritual  and  spiritualized  our  physical  life 
as  dogmatic  theology  never  did;  a  truism  that 
science  and  religion  are  mutually  explanatory ; 
that  natural  law,  by  involving  all  the  func- 
tions of  man,  quickens  the  soul  as  no  imagined 
law  could  ever  do  which  appealed  only  to  one 
or  two  functions ;  that  our  sense  of  identity 
with  nature  elevates  our  view  of  nature  rather 
than  lowers  respect  for  ourselves ;  that  private 
aspiration  gains  from  its  coalescence  with  so- 
cial duty;  a  truism  that  art,  morality,  lan- 
guage have  to  be  explained  on  biological  prin- 
ciples, and  that  age  and  race  largely  determine, 
works  and  men :  that  great  works  remain  dom- 
inant because  of  their  grasp  of  abiding  rela- 
tions, their  hold  on  the  perennial  aspirations 
of  men;  a  truism  that  Realism  and  Idealism 
instead  of  being  antagonistic  are  both  inevita- 
ble phases  of  any  work  of  art.  These  are 
all  truisms  of  the  synthetic  philosophy:  the 
important  matter  being  personal,  that  Sy- 
monds  arrived  at  them  not  by  intellectual  ac- 
ceptance alone,  but  by  the  labor  and  suffering 
of  a  lifetime,  and  held  them  as  convictions  of 
experience.  That  fact  alone  elevates  the 


196  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

truism  into  a  human  document,  and  places 
the  essays,  defective  in  bright  ideas  and  re- 
dundant in  illustration  as  they  are,  high 
among  his  writings.  I  should  point  especially 
to  the  paper  on  National  Style  as  one  of  the 
most  suggestive,  learned,  and  eloquent  of 
English  essays.  For  the  understanding  of 
Symonds  himself  the  essays  on  the  Philosophy 
of  Evolution,  Nature  Myths  and  Allegories, 
Landscape,  and  Notes  on  Theism  are  indis- 
pensable. Of  the  book  in  general  Frederic 
Harrison  observes:  "For  grasp  of  thought, 
directness,  sureness  of  judgment,  the  Essays 
of  1890  seem  to  me  the  most  solid  things  that 
Symonds  has  left."  No  doubt:  but  certainly 
not  the  most  characteristic  and  therefore  not 
the  most  admirable  as  literature.  They  show 
the  steady  growth  of  his  mind  toward  ex- 
ternality and  impersonal  thought,  and  they 
speak  from  a  happier  and  more  contented  life. 
But  Symonds  was  essentially  an  artist,  and  a 
thinker  only  incidentally. 

As  time  went  on  and  his  malady  left  him 
with  less  and  less  hope  he  became  extremely 
reckless  of  his  health.  Over  and  over  again 


LAST  YEARS:  DEATH         197 

he  sprained  his  ankles  by  heedless  impetuosity; 
once  he  did  so  in  scrambling  over  the  ice- 
coated  tree-trunks  after  a  bout  of  wood- 
cutting. He  would  spend  days  and  nights  in 
peasant  huts,  washing  at  the  pump — once 
when  it  was  so  cold  that  even  a  vial  of  quinine 
and  sulphuric  acid  froze  in  his  bedroom.  He 
never  missed  a  gymnastic  meet,  and  would 
often  clear  the  course  and  time  the  racers,  din- 
ing and  making  merry  and  driving  home  at 
midnight  in  an  open  sledge  against  the  icy 
glacial  wind.  "To-day,"  he  writes  to  Mr. 
Gosse,  "I  started  with  my  girls  and  our  to- 
boggans, and  ran  a  course  of  four  miles, 
crashing  at  lightning  speed  over  the  ice  and 
snow.  We  did  the  journey  in  about  eleven 
minutes,  and  I  came  in  breathless,  dead-beat, 
almost  fainting.  Then  home  in  the  railway, 
with  open  windows  and  a  mad  crew  of  young 
men  and  maidens  excited  by  this  thrilling  ex- 
ercise." .  .  .  "Not  a  cure  for  bronchitis,"  he 
observes. 

Under  conditions  of  this  kind  the  disease 
in  his  lungs  was  constantly  fanned  and  the 
fuel  was  rapidly  burning  up.  Only  his  brain 


198  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

was  calmer,  clearer,  stronger  than  ever.  Life 
had  taken  its  last  seat  there  and  gathered  force 
for  a  few  vigorous  efforts.  Never  had  his 
work  been  so  substantial. 

The  constant  aim  which  had  buoyed  him  up 
for  so  many  years  found  expression  in  a  char- 
acteristic letter  to  Mr.  Brown  (July  2,  1891) : 
"You  know  how  little  I  seek  after  fame,  and 
how  little  I  value  the  fame  of  famous  men. 
You  also  know  how  much  I  value  self -effec- 
tuation; how  I  deeply  feel  it  to  be  the  duty 
of  a  man  to  make  the  best  of  himself,  to  use 
his  talents,  to  make  his  very  defects  serve  as 
talents,  and  to  be  something  for  God's  sake 
who  made  him.  In  other  words,  to  play  his 
own  note  in  the  universal  symphony.  We 
have  not  to  ask  whether  other  people  will  be 
affected  by  our  written  views  of  this  or  that; 
though,  for  my  part,  I  find  now,  with  every 
day  I  live,  that  my  written  views  have  had  a 
wide  and  penetrating  influence  where  often 
least  expected.  That  is  no  affair  of  mine,  any 
more  than  of  a  sunflower  to  be  yellow,  or  a 
butterfly  to  flutter.  The  point  for  us  is  to 
bring  all  parts  of  ourselves  into  vital  correla- 


LAST  YEARS:  DEATH         199 

tion,  so  that  we  shall  think  nothing,  write 
nothing,  love  nothing,  but  in  relation  to  the 
central  personality — the  bringing  of  which 
into  prominence  is  what  is  our  destiny  and 
duty  in  this  short  life.  And  my  conclusion 
is  that,  in  this  one  life,  given  to  us  on  earth, 
it  is  the  man's  duty,  as  recompense  to  God  who 
placed  him  here,  or  Nature,  Mother  of  us  all — 
and  the  man's  highest  pleasure,  as  a  potent  in- 
dividuality— to  bring  all  factors  of  his  being 
into  correspondence  for  the  presentation  of 
himself  in  something.  Whether  the  world  re- 
gards that  final  self -presentation  of  the  man 
or  not  seems  to  me  just  no  matter.  As  Jenny 
Lind  once  said  to  me,  'I  sing  to  God,'  so,  I 
say,  let  us  sing  to  God.  And  for  this  end  let 
us  not  allow  ourselves  to  be  submerged  in  pas- 
sion, or  our  love  to  lapse  in  grubbery;  but  let 
us  be  human  beings,  horribly  imperfect  cer- 
tainly, living  for  the  best  effectuation  of 
themselves  which  they  find  possible.  If  all 
men  and  women  lived  like  this,  the  symphony 
of  humanity  would  be  a  splendid  thing  to 
listen  to."  Magnificently  true  and  memorable 


200  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

words,  which  indicate  the  unwavering  aim,  in- 
dividual and  social,  of  his  vexed  life. 

At  the  suggestion  of  two  different  pub- 
lishers he  undertook  a  small  book  on  Boccac- 
cio, which  was  carried  through  with  little  ef- 
fort, and  his  great  Life  of  Michael  Angela. 
The  latter  work  occupied  almost  the  whole  of 
the  years  1891-92.  He  approached  it  not 
only  with  a  lifelong  and  profound  sympathy 
with  its  subject,  but  with  more  patient  and 
laborious  research  probably  than  he  had  ever 
specifically  bestowed  on  any  previous  work; 
and  he  brought  to  it  all  the  broad  experience, 
the  calmness  and  strength  acquired  in  his  later 
and  more  impersonal  years.  The  archives  of 
the  Casa  Buonarroti  in  Florence  had  been 
thrown  open  on  Michael  Angelo's  fourth  cen- 
tenary in  1875;  and  Symonds  was  the  first 
student  to  utilize  the  voluminous  correspond- 
ence, manuscripts,  notes,  and  other  papers  in 
a  great  enterprise.  His  method  of  treatment 
is  appropriately  austere.  How  very  far  he 
had  traveled  in  criticism  may  be  gathered 
from  his  chapter  on  the  Sistine  frescoes,  where 
in  former  years  he  would  have  revelled  in  sub- 


LAST  YEARS:  DEATH         201 

jective  interpretation,  after  the  fashion  of 
Michelet,  indulging  in  rapturous  soliloquy 
over  their  hidden  meanings.  Here  as  else- 
where he  searches  dispassionately  in  a  purely 
artistic  spirit,  no  longer  with  any  of  the  spirit 
of  literature.  Similarly  in  writing  of  the 
Medici  tombs  he  casts  aside  the  more  con- 
genial, modern,  Rodinesque  notion,  that  the 
blocked-out  forms  were  deliberately  left  un- 
finished to  gain  through  their  vagueness,  as 
"sentimental,  not  scientific  criticism."  At  the 
same  time,  as  a  student  of  Plato  and  a  trans- 
lator of  Michael  Angelo's  sonnets,  he  meas- 
ured everything  by  the  spiritual  touchstone 
of  the  master's  mind.  Like  ^Bschylus,  like 
Goethe,  like  Whitman,  Michael  Angelo  ap- 
pealed to  him  as  a  superb  tonic  force,  which 
"arrests,  quickens,  stings,  purges,  and  stirs  to 
uneasy  self-examination." 

The  Life  of  Michael  Angelo  involved,  of 
course,  journeys  to  Florence  and  Rome  and 
through  the  Casentino,  in  the  company  of  his 
Venetian  servant  Angelo.  The  condition  of 
his  nerves,  largely  from  overwork,  seems  to 
have  kept  him  in  a  state  of  constant  irritabil- 


202  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

ity;  and  he  complains  of  the  repellent,  heart- 
less, prosaic  Apennines  and  the  "twangle, 
wrangle,  jangle"  of  the  southern  folk.  Twice 
he  dreamed  of  Jowett:  "the  deepest,  strangest 
dreams,  in  which  he  came  to  me,  and  was 
quite  glorified,  and  spoke  to  me  so  sweetly  and 
kindly — as  though  he  understood  some  ancient 
wrong  he  had  not  fathomed  in  me  before,  and 
blessed  me  and  made  me  feel  that  this  and 
all  else  would  be  right.  .  .  .  These  two 
dreams  have  haunted  me  with  a  sense  of  atone- 
ment and  softness."  When  he  reached  Rome 
he  found  a  letter  from  his  sister,  Mrs.  Green, 
who  was  nursing  the  old  man  at  Balliol:  he 
was  very  ill  and,  as  it  seemed,  near  death, 
though  he  was  to  live  long  enough  to  write 
the  inscription  for  Symonds'  grave.  Jowett 
in  later  years  had  become  infinitely  more  ten- 
der and  sympathetic,  and  his  biographers  re- 
mark that  he  had  come  to  feel  the  need  of 
fusing  intellect  with  emotion.  The  "inexora- 
ble mentor"  who  could  give  his  friends  no  rest 
while  any  defect  remained  unreproved  appears 
sweet-souled  indeed  in  his  letters  to  Charlotte 
Symonds,  who  was  his  god-daughter.  "What 


LAST  YEARS:  DEATH        203 

a  temple  of  peaceful  industry!"  he  writes, 
early  in  1892,  "in  which  father  and  mother 
and  you  and  Madge  are  all  writing  books. 
The  world  will  not  contain  the  books  that  are 
written  in  that  house." 

In  the  autumn  of  1891  Symonds'  practice 
was  to  write  from  9:30  to  12:30  in  the  morn- 
ing, to  sleep  two  hours  in  the  afternoon,  dine 
at  6:30,  and  then  resume  work  from  8  in  the 
evening  till  1  or  2  in  the  morning.  His 
daughter  Margaret  served  as  his  amanuensis. 
In  this  way  Michael  Angela  was  finished  by 
December.  It  left  him  exhausted.  Through- 
out 1892  he  struggled  on,  attacked  by  influ- 
enza and  constant  fainting  fits,  and  feeling, 
as  he  observed,  threadbare.  "I  am  writing  in 
my  study  on  a  cold  morning,  before  the  sun 
has  climbed  the  Jacobshorn.  Out  there — in 
the  void  infinite,  the  unexplored,  intangible — 
what  is  to  become  of  a  soul  so  untamably 
young  in  its  old  ruined  body,  consuming  its 
last  drop  of  vital  oil  with  the  flame  of 
beauty?"  With  Margaret  Symonds  he  pub- 
lished Our  Life  in  the  Swiss  Highlands.  The 
great  success  of  his  Michael  Angela  cheered 


204,  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

him.  His  chief  work  during  the  year  was  the 
Study  of  Whitman,  suggested  by  the  poet's 
death  in  March.  In  the  summer  he  made  his 
farewell  visit  to  England.  He  knew  now  that 
he  had  but  a  short  time  to  live,  and  he  was 
haunted  by  premonitions  of  death: 

"Last  Sunday  night  I  was  lying  awake, 
thinking  of  death,  desiring  death;  when,  lost 
in  this  sombre  mood,  to  me  the  bedroom  was 
at  a  moment  filled  with  music — the  'Lontan 
lontano,'  from  Boito's  Mefistofele,  together 
with  its  harp  accompaniment  .  .  .  'Lontan 
lontano'  has  not  yet  left  my  auditory  sense- 
stays  behind  all  other  sensations — seems  to  in- 
dicate a  vague  and  infinite,  yet  very  near  .  .  ." 

This  was  written  on  February  22,  1893, 
only  a  few  days  before  his  departure  from 
Davos  on  that  final  journey  which  has  been 
described  in  the  now  celebrated  narrative  by 
Margaret  Symonds,  Mrs.  Vaughn.  From 
this  narrative,  so  minutely  circumstantial,  so 
tender,  vivid  and  pathetic,  I  can  only  condense 
the  final  record. 

Symonds  with  his  daughter  left  Davos  in 
the  middle  of  March  and  passed  a  few  days 


LAST  YEARS:  DEATH         205 

in  Venice,  where  he  was  occupied  with  his 
Whitman  proofs.  There  Angelo  joined  them. 
On  March  21  they  travelled  by  express  to  Bari. 
Spending  a  day  at  Taranto,  Symonds  busied 
himself  with  a  pickaxe,  rooting  up  and  pack- 
ing a  great  number  of  anemone  and  iris  bulbs 
for  a  friend  in  the  North.  In  the  evening  he 
joined  the  natives  in  a  rough  pizzica  dance. 
Then  they  travelled  northward  to  Salerno. 
They  had  one  splendid  day  at  Passtum,  where 
Symonds  tried  to  work  out  some  theory  of  his 
about  the  roofing  of  the  temples.  They  drove 
to  Amalfi  and  thence  to  Naples,  a  visit  of  five 
days.  Their  mornings  were  passed  in  the 
museum.  They  ascended  Vesuvius,  where  Sy- 
monds observed  that  Michael  Angelo  must 
have  studied  his  figures  for  the  Last  Judg- 
ment from  the  writhing  lava  upon  the  slopes. 
Heedless  of  the  damp  chill,  he  spent  hours  in 
the  crypts  of  the  churches,  fascinated  by  the 
southern  architecture,  which  was  unfamiliar 
to  him. 

From  Naples,  early  in  April,  they  jour- 
neyed to  Rome.  The  silver  wedding  of  the 
King  and  Queen  was  approaching  and  the 


206  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

city  was  in  an  uproar  of  preparation.  So 
crowded  were  all  the  hotels  that  only  after 
considerable  delay  did  they  procure  rooms  on 
the  fifth  storey  of  the  Hotel  d'ltalia.  They 
found  many  friends  in  Rome,  and  accepted  a 
number  of  invitations.  Symonds'  conversa- 
tion was  unusually  brilliant,  his  mind  intensely 
active  and  buoyant.  He  went  the  round  of 
the  galleries,  drove  along  the  Appian  Way,  to 
the  Palatine  and  the  Trastevere  Gardens.  It 
was  very  warm;  the  sun  blazed  overhead,  and 
the  flowers  ran  riot  everywhere.  Symonds  ex- 
plored the  ruins,  adventurous  and  happy. 

On  Sunday,  the  16th,  he  was  especially  ani- 
mated, and  took  an  almost  childish  delight  in 
certain  effects  of  wisteria  and  yellow-berried 
ivy.  That  evening  he  felt  ill  and  went  to  bed 
at  once  upon  returning  to  the  hotel.  There 
was  much  influenza  in  Home,  and  he  had  been 
recklessly  imprudent.  The  next  morning  his 
throat  suggested  diphtheria.  He  received  a 
visit  from  his  old  school  friend,  Mr.  Corbett, 
but  he  felt  very  tired  and  suffered  from  dif- 
ficulty in  breathing.  In  the  afternoon  his 
mind  wandered  a  little.  In  the  evening  the 


LAST  YEARS:  DEATH         207 

doctor  talked  to  him  about  his  books,  and, 
turning  to  his  daughter,  remarked  jestingly, 
"Your  father  is  already  immortal."  The 
damp  Roman  night  air  made  it  increasingly 
difficult  for  him  to  breathe.  He  seemed  to 
know  that  his  end  was  approaching.  On 
Tuesday,  the  18th,  he  wrote  a  brief  letter  to 
.his  wife,  who  had  fallen  ill  at  Venice  and 
could  not  come.  His  throat  was  too  swollen 
to  admit  food  or  drink.  He  asked  for  a  little 
book  of  texts  which  had  been  his  mother's  and 
in  which  from  childhood  he  had  read  every 
day.  In  the  afternoon  an  English  nun  came 
in  to  nurse  him.  He  talked  without  inter- 
mission to  himself.  His  daughter  observes 
that  he  seemed  to  be  wandering  back  through 
the  thoughts,  not  the  experience  of  his  old  life. 
The  heat  was  excessive,  and  the  city  was  in  a 
tumult. 

On  Wednesday,  April  19th,  it  was  evident 
that  pneumonia  had  settled  in  both  lungs  and 
was  gradually  paralyzing  them  and  the  heart. 
He  continued  to  talk  incessantly  to  himself, 
but  in  a  very  faint  voice.  His  face  grew  sud- 
denly much  younger,  and  in  the  last  hour  his 


208  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

expression  was  almost  that  of  a  boy.  He 
died  quietly  and  peacefully,  at  the  end  of  ex- 
haustion. It  was  the  middle  of  a  cloudless 
day.  Outside,  in  the  blazing  sunlight,  the  fes- 
tivities went  on  tumultuously.  In  the  evening 
the  air  was  filled  with  the  noise  of  music  and 
salutes  and  brightened  with  innumerable  fire- 
works. 

The  first  one  to  bring  flowers  to  the  death- 
room  was  the  hotel  porter,  a  Graubiinden 
peasant,  who  came  with  Roman  lilacs  for  the 
friend  of  his  people.  They  were  followed  by 
numerous  wreaths,  sent  by  strangers  who 
knew  Symonds  through  his  books.  In  Eng- 
land, the  same  day,  his  Study  of  Walt  Whit- 
man was  published. 

A  little  plot  was  procured  for  him  in  the 
Protestant  Cemetery,  close  to  the  grave  of 
Shelley.  At  three  o'clock  on  Thursday  morn- 
ing his  body  was  carried  across  the  city  and 
deposited  at  dawn  in  the  mortuary  chapel. 
The  funeral  took  place  at  four  o'clock  on 
Saturday  afternoon.  It  was  a  day  of  splen- 
did sunshine;  the  grass  was  full  of  April 
flowers  and  the  birds  sang  in  the  cypress  trees. 


LAST  YEARS:  DEATH         209 

The  epitaph  was  written  by  Jowett,  so  soon 
to  follow  his  old  pupil  in  death;  and  on  the 
gravestone  it  is  followed  by  the  prayer  of 
Cleanthes  the  Stoic,  in  the  version  of  Symonds 
himself. 

Infra  Jacet 

JOHANNES   ADDINGTON    SYMONDS 

vir  luminibus  ingenii  multis 

et  industria  singular!, 

cujus  animus 

infirmo  licet  in  corpora 

literarum  et  historiae  studio  ardebat. 

Bristolii  natus  V.  Oct.  MDCCCXL. 

Requievit  in  Christo  XIX  Ap.  MDCCCXCIII. 


Ave  carissime 

nemo  te  magis  in  corde  amicos  fovebat 
nee  in  simplices  et  indoctos  benevolentior  erat. 

Lead  thou  me,  God,  Law,  Reason,  Motion,  Life! 

All  names  for  Thee  alike  are  vain  and  hollow : 
Lead  me,  for  I  will  follow  without  strife, 

Or  if  I  strive,  still  must  I  blindly  follow. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
CONCLUSION 

rTIHE  life,  work,  and  philosophical  position 
A  of  Symonds  illustrate  one  another  as  in 
few  recorded  cases.  Seldom  has  intellect  so 
clearly  reflected  character,  and  character  ma- 
terial facts.  I  think  it  would  be  possible  to 
trace  the  man's  peculiar  quality,  style,  method, 
influence,  and  choice  of  themes  in  an  unbroken 
chain  to  sheer  physiological  necessity.  Neu- 
rotic from  birth,  suppressed  and  misdirected 
in  education,  turned  by  early  environment  and 
by  natural  affinity  into  certain  intellectual  and 
spiritual  channels,  pressed  into  speculation  by 
dogmatic  surroundings  and  aesthetic  study, 
his  naturally  febrile  constitution  shattered  by 
over-stimulation,  by  wanting  vitality  denied 
robust  creation,  by  disease  made  a  wanderer, 
by  disease  and  wandering  together  aroused  to 
an  unending,  fretful  activity — the  inner  his- 

210 


CONCLUSION  211 

tory  of  Symonds  could  be  detailed  and  charted 
scientifically.  A  little  imagination  will  serve 
as  well  to  call  up  the  human  character  of  a 
development  which  is  uncommonly  fitted  for 
psychological  study. 

One  cannot  read  extensively  in  Symonds 
without  discovering  two  facts:  first,  that  the 
matter  of  ever-uppermost  concern  with  him  is 
religion,  the  emotional  relation  which  man 
bears  to  the  whole  scheme  of  things;  and,  sec- 
ondly, that  his  way  of  conceiving  this  rela- 
tion repeats  itself  constantly  in  similar  state- 
ments and  in  references  to  a  clearly  defined 
circle  of  historic  thought.  With  hardly  an 
exception  his  critical  volumes  close  on  a  com- 
mon note,  which  forms  the  kernel  of  his  poems 
and  speculations.  I  cannot  say  how  often  he 
refers  to  Goethe's  Proemium  to  Gott  und 
Welt  and  the  prayer  of  Cleanthes,  to  Marcus 
Aurelius  andjGiordano  Bruno,  and  above  all, 
Whitman.  (This  circle  of  recurring  references 
expressed  the  emotional  and  vital  elements  in 
a  point  of  view  which  found  its  purely  intel- 
lectual basis  in  the  evolution  philosophy.  A 
natural  affinity  thus  predisposed  him  to  estab- 


212  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

lish  his  theory  of  criticism  upon  the  wider 
philosophical  basis  empirically  provided  by  the 
nineteenth  century.  A  natural  affinity,  I  say, 
because  I  wish  to  show  plainly  that  his  accept- 
ance of  evolution  was  not  merely  intellectual 
and  that  his  writings  were  really  the  out- 
growth of  his  character  and  his  fundamental 
emotions  towards  lifeTS 

From  that  laborious,  dutiful  father  of  his 
he  inherited  a  stoical  habit  of  mind,  at  vari- 
ance indeed  with  his  early  tendencies,  which 
yet  in  mature  life  became  practically  domi- 
nant. But  in  the  son  stoicism — the  sentiment 
of  work  and  duty — was  wholly  separated 
from  its  dogmatic  and  theoretical  applications 
in  the  father.  (For  Symonds  was  a  conscious 
sceptic  long  before  he  was  a  conscious  stoic?) 
His  scepticism  seems  early  to  have  been  se- 
cretly fostered  by  just  the  dogmatic  nature 
of  his  father's  stoicism.  His  youth  was  like 
the  insurrection  of  a  Greek  province  against 
the  Roman  Empire.  ^Esthetic  study,  dialec- 
tics, neurotic  activity  destroyed  for  him  the 
logical  texture  of  Christianity  and,  combined 
with  the  scepticism  of  JoAvett  which  questioned 


CONCLUSION  213 

life  without  questioning  God,  destroyed  in  him 
the  sentiment  of  faith :  for  losing  faith  in  life 
he  could  not,  as  Jowett  paradoxically  did,  re- 
tain belief  in  Go^D 

By  the  time  he  left  college,  then,  his  posi- 
tion was  reasonably  clear.  With  a  substratum 
of  stoicism,  of  which  he  was  not  yet  aware, 
his  mind  was  packed  with  miscellaneous 
knowledge  of  European  culture  and  had  a 
strong  bias  toward  Greek  thought.  But  the 
centre  of  his  heart  was  not  occupied.  There 
was  a  void,  a  vacuum,  and  of  this  the  man 
was  desperately  aware.  Just  here  he  differs 
from  really  small  men,  just  in  this  fact  lies 
whatever  power  of  personality  and  achieve- 
ment finally  marked  him  out.  His  heart 
would  not  let  him  rest.  His  mind  was  unable 
to  occupy  him  calmly,  to  allow  him  to  exercise 
a  soulless  literary  gift.  He  was  paralyzed 
by  the  want  of  a  central  animating  principle. 
And  with  all  his  natural  talent,  his  facility  in 
words,  his  abundant  learning,  he  could  pro- 
duce nothing.  It  took  him  longer  than  most 
men  to  find  himself,  because  his  niche  in  the 
universe  was  more  essential  to  him  than  his 


214  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

niche  in  the  world.  During  all  the  years  in 
which  he  was  storing  up  knowledge  he  was  a 
man  passionately  in  search  of  religion.  Natur- 
ally, then,  he  found  this  religion,  and  as 
naturally  it  had  to  be  one  consonant  with  his 
peculiar  physical  condition  and  the  stock  of 
his  brain.  In  these  respects  he  was  a  member 
of  the  post-Darwinian  group  at  Oxford,  who 
felt  so  keenly  the  vacuum  which  remained 
when  the  dogmatic  elements  of  the  old  faith 
had  been  swept  away.  This  point  enables  us 
to  understand  the  English  influence  of  Whit- 
man and  that  vague  but  powerful  cult  first 
called  by  Henry  Sidgwick  the  "cosmic  en- 
thusiasm." 

We  must  grasp  the  idea  of  a  natural  mys- 
tic, deprived  of  dogmatic  outlet,  an  eclectic  of 
culture,  a  man  physically  weak,  intellectually 
sophisticated,  over-educated,  strangely  suscep- 
tible to  beauty,  strength,  powerful  influences. 
Such  a  man  finds  his  first  foothold  in  Goethe, 
because  Goethe  is  almost  the  only  character 
which,  as  it  were,  includes  a  man  of  such  wide 
range,  and  provides  a  generous  margin,  points 
out  a  path  of  cohesion.  For  Symonds,  Goethe 


CONCLUSION  215 

was  an  elaboration,  a  modern  instance  of  the 
spirit  which  had  drawn  him  into  Greek 
studies — the  spirit  of  scientific  pantheism.  In 
Greek  thought  he  found,  first  of  all,  a  moral 
attitude.  In  their  sense  of  a  cosmic  order, 
an  all-embracing  law,  their  sense  of  harmony 
with  nature  and  of  divinity  in  nature,  he  dis- 
covered the  ground-plan  of  a  modern  creed 
which  required  only  to  be  confirmed  by  experi- 
ment and  animated  by  emotion.  He'  found 
that  in  their  submission  to  law  they  had  sur- 
mounted the  enervating  elements  of  fatalism 
by  resolutely  facing  and  absorbing  the  sad 
things  of  life,  including  them  in  selected  types 
of  predominant  beauty  and  strength.  The 
logical  apex  of  Greek  ethics  he  found  in  Mar- 
cus Aurelius :  its  obedience  to  the  common  rea- 
son of  the  universe,  its  social  virtue,  its  faith 
in  the  Tightness  of  things  we  cannot  see.  This 
attitude,  except  for  its  lack  of  compelling 
force,  its  inadequacy  to  men  who  have  been 
indulged  with  a  more  celestial  dream,  seemed 
to  him  consonant  with  modern  science,  as 
Christian  theology  could  not  be.  For  Chris- 
tian theology  made  man  an  exile  from  nature, 


216  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

dependent  for  salvation  upon  a  being  external 
to  the  universe  and  controlling  it  from  with- 
out. The  crucial  utterances  of  Christian  the- 
ology— such,  for  example,  as  St.  Paul's  "For 
if  Christ  be  not  risen  indeed,  then  are  we  of  all 
men  most  miserable,"  or  Thomas  a  Kempis' 
"For  me  to  live  is  Christ,  and  to  die  is  gain," 
are  contradictory  to  the  idea  of  a  divinity  im- 
manent in  nature  of  which  man's  conscious- 
ness forms  a  part. 

This  moral  attitude  Symonds  found  ex- 
pressed in  three  utterances,  to  all  of  which  he 
constantly  recurs.  The  first,  which  he  called 
his  motto,  is  the  maxim  of  Goethe,  "To  live 
resolvedly  in  the  Whole,  the  Good,  the  Beauti- 
ful." The  second  is  the  prayer  of  Cleanthes 
the  Stoic,  which  in  his  own  version  was  written 
over  Symonds'  grave: 

Lead  thou  me,  God,  Law,  Reason,  Motion,  Life ! 

All  names  for  Thee  alike  are  vain  and  hollow: 
Lead  me,  for  I  will   follow  without  strife, 

Or  if  I  strive,  still  must  I  blindly  follow. 

The  third  is  Goethe's  Proemium  to  Gott 
und  Welt,  Faust's  confession  of  faith;  trans- 
lated thus  by  Symonds: 


CONCLUSION  217 

To  Him  who  from  eternity,  self-stirred, 
Himself  hath  made  by  His  creative  word; 
To  Him  who,  seek  to  name  Him  as  we  will, 
Unknown  within  Himself  abideth  still: 
To  Him  supreme  who  maketh  faith  to  be, 
Trust,  hope,  love,  power,  and  endless  energy. 

Strain  ear  and  eye  till  sight  and  sound  be  dim, 

Thou'lt  find  but  faint  similitudes  of  Him; 

Yea,  and  thy  spirit  in  her  flight  of  flame 

Still  tries  to  gauge  the  symbol  and  the  name: 

Charmed  and  compelled,  thou  climb'st    from  height    to 

height 

And  round  thy  path  the  world  shines  wondrous  bright; 
Time,  space,  and  size  and  distance  cease  to  be, 
And  every  step  is  fresh  infinity. 

What  were  the  God  who  sat  outside  to  see 

The  spheres  beneath  His  finger  circling  free? 

God  dwells  within,  and  moves  the  world  and  moulds; 

Himself  and  nature  in  one  form  enfolds: 

Thus  all  that  lives  in  Him  and  breathes  and  is, 

Shall  ne'er  His  presence,  ne'er  His  spirit  miss. 

The  soul  of  man,  too,  is  an  universe ; 
Whence  follows  it  that  race  with  race  concurs 
In  naming  all  it  knows  of  good  and  true, 
God — yea,  its  own  God — and  witli  honor  due 
Surrenders  to  His  sway  both  earth  and  heaven, 
Fears  Him,  and  loves,  where  place  for  love  is  given. 


218  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

Characteristically  this  translation  was  writ- 
ten on  the  glacier  at  Heiligenblut,  June  27, 
1870.  I  shall  have  occasion  presently  to  con- 
nect it  with  his  feeling  about  the  Alps. 

This  philosophical  position,  I  have  said, 
formed  for  him  the  ground-plan  of  a  modern 
creed  which  required  only  to  be  confirmed  by 
experiment  and  animated  by  emotion.  The 
first  of  these  requisites  he  found  in  the  evolu- 
tion theory,  the  second  in  Whitman. 

Symonds'  use  of  the  word  evolution  has 
been  severely  criticised  on  the  ground  that  he 
too  laxly  identifies  it  with  growth.  Whatever 
truth  may  be  in  the  charge  I  think  is  due  to 
two  causes — first,  that  he  approaches  the  prob- 
lem rather  imaginatively  than  in  the  spirit  of 
exact  science,  and  secondly  that  his  data  are 
historical  and  aesthetic  rather  than  biological 
or  geological.  In  short,  the  aspect  of  evolu- 
tion he  has  always  in  mind  is  the  evolution  of 
the  human  spirit,  which  is  not  yet  so  accu- 
rately determinable  as  the  primary  physical  as- 
pects of  life.  In  his  application  of  evolution 
to  criticism,  in  his  effort  to  show  that  science 
and  religion  are  complementary,  he  was  a  pio- 


CONCLUSION  219 

neer  and  he  had,  so  to  speak,  the  pioneer's 
axe  to  grind;  so  that  what  he  wrote  on  these 
themes  must  be  taken,  in  his  own  spirit,  as 
personal  suggestions  and  speculations.  Intel- 
lectually the  evolution  theory  proved  to  him 
what  the  Greeks  and  Marcus  Aurelius  had  di- 
vined, how  truly  man  is  part  of  nature  and 
how  "nature  everywhere,  and  in  all  her  parts, 
must  contain  what  corresponds  to  our  spiritual 
essence." 

There  is,  however,  a  long  step  to  take  from 
the  philosophy  of  nature  to  the  religion  of 
nature — the  step  from  what  may  be  called  the 
cosmic  sense  to  what  has  been  called  the  cosmic 
enthusiasm.  The  prayer  of  Cleanthes  is  a 
statement  of  submission: 

Lead  me,  for  I  will  follow  without  strife, 
Or  if  I  strive,  still  must  I  blindly  follow. 

Indeed  that  is  what  man  does  whether  he  will 
or  no;  therein  he  still  remains  in  bondage  to 
fate,  because  he  does  not  yet  with  hearty  con- 
fidence affirm,  "In  Thy  will  is  our  peace." 
Powerless  as  man's  will  is  before  cosmic  law, 


220  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

he  may  still  believe  that  his  happiness  lies  in 
opposition  to  cosmic  law.  His  acquiescence  is 
not  yet  enthusiastic.  And  as  Symonds  wrote 
in  his  Greek  Poets:  "The  real  way  of  achiev- 
ing a  triumph  over  chance  and  of  defying 
fate  is  to  turn  to  good  account  all  fair  and 
wholesome  things  beneath  the  sun,  and  to 
maintain  for  an  ideal  the  beauty,  strength  and 
splendor  of  the  body,  mind  and  will  of  man." 
The  way  to  hold  one's  own  in  the  swift-flow- 
ing stream  is  to  swim  with  it,  using  the  current 
for  one's  own  progress.  Under  these  condi- 
tions the  possibility  of  a  new  religion  is  indi- 
cated in  the  following  passage:  "Through 
criticism,  science  sprang  into  being;  and  sci- 
ence, so  far  as  it  touches  the  idea  of  deity, 
brought  once  more  into  overwhelming  promi- 
nence the  Greek  conception  of  God  as  Law. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  claims  of  humanity 
upon  our  duty  and  devotion  grew  in  impor- 
tance, so  that  the  spirit  and  teaching  of  Christ, 
the  suffering,  the  self-sacrificing,  the  merciful, 
and  at  the  same  time  the  just,  survived  the 
decay  of  his  divinity.  In  other  words,  the 
two  factors  of  primitive  Christianity  are  again 


CONCLUSION  221 

disengaged,  and  again  demand  incorporation 
in  a  religion  which  shall  combine  the  concep- 
tion of  obedience  to  supreme  Law  and  of  de- 
votion to  Humanity,  both  of  which  have  been 
spiritualized,  sublimed,  and  rendered  positive 
by  the  action  of  thought  and  experience. 
What  religion  has  to  do,  if  it  remains  theistic, 
is  to  create  an  enthusiasm  in  which  the  cosmic 
emotion  shall  coalesce  with  the  sense  of  social 
duty."  [The  Philosophy  of  Evolution.'} 

Here  then  the  fire  was  laid,  ready  to  be 
lighted.  Whitman  touched  the  match.  I  have 
already  told  how  in  1865  Symonds  dis- 
covered Whitman.  Years  afterward  he  wrote : 
"Leaves  of  Grass>  which  I  first  read  at  the 
age  of  twenty-five,  influenced  me  more  per- 
haps than  any  other  book  has  done,  except  the 
Bible;  more  than  Plato,  more  than  Goethe. 
It  is  impossible  for  me  to  speak  critically  of 
what  has  so  deeply  entered  into  the  fibre  and 
marrow  of  my  Jbeing."  In  Whitman  all  these 
smouldering  theories,  these  gently,  passively 
emotional  thoughts  sprang  up  as  a  flame 
warming  and  lighting  all  the  implications  of 
the  cosmic  idea:  the  universe,  the  individual, 


222  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

sex,  friendship,  democracy.  Whitman's  pas- 
sionate belief  in  life,  stout  subordination  of 
the  world's  experience  to  the  forthright  soul, 
superb  emotional  grasp  of  the  principle  of 
development,  glory  in  health,  disregard  of 
cerebration,  innocence  of  the  sinister  power  of 
creeds,  customs,  human  laws  to  swamp  the 
cosmic  energy  in  man — all  this,  on  a  dozen 
scores,  was  calculated  to  electrify  a  man  like 
Symonds.  He  accepted  the  whole  of  Whit- 
man as  he  had  never  accepted  the  whole  of 
anything  before.  And  with  Whitman  he 
came  to  accept  the  whole  of  life. 

Was  there  something  a  little  hectic  about 
all  this?  The  sheer  physical  health  which  un- 
derlay Whitman's  exultation  was  just  what 
Symonds  did  not  possess.  The  question  arises, 
can  the  cosmic  enthusiasm,  which  is  really  the 
joy  of  living,  exist  healthily  in  those  who  are 
not  healthy?  And  if  the  joy  of  living  is  to 
be  identified  with  religion,  can  any  but  healthy 
people  be  truly  religious?  It  is  open  to  seri- 
ous question  whether  any  man  can  love  the 
universe  whose  digestion  is  faulty.  The  ques- 
tion is  perhaps  insoluble,  yet  in  it  lies  the  na- 


CONCLUSION  223 

ture  of  Symonds'  inherent  sincerity,  taking 
that  word  in  its  absolute  sense.  From  his  ac- 
ceptance of  Whitman  sprang  the  animated 
point  of  view  which  controlled  his  later  life 
and  underlay  his  writings.  That  alone  is  an 
earnest  of  sincerity!  and  yet  I  accept  it  with 
misgivings,  because  he  never  eradicated  his 
even  more  fundamental  scepticism,  he  never 
ceased  interrogating  the  sphinx  even  in  the 
midst  of  his  adoration.  Or  perhaps  I  should 
say  the  cosmic  law  remained  for  him  a  sphinx, 
the  projection  of  his  own  sphinxliness  (I  think 
Plato  would  forgive  this  word) — instead  of 
the  more  obvious,  blunt,  vital  force  Whitman 
felt  it  to  be:  which  means  merely  that  both 
men  created  the  cosmos  in  their  own  image. 
I  mention  it  because  it  qualifies  our  notion  of 
this  discipleship.  It  enables  us  to  see  that  for 
Symonds  the  cosmic  enthusiasm  could  really 
be  only  a  working-plan,  a  literary  and  intel- 
lectual synthesis  and  a  social  platform,  while 
the  quintessence  of  the  man  remained  as  vola- 
tile, as  evanescent,  as  unremoved  and  un- 
expressed as  ever.  The  real  Symonds — the 
"Opalstein"  of  Stevenson — could  never  flash 


224  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

itself  into  the  rough  colors  of  critical  prose 
and  common  life.  Behind  the  calm  sweep  of 
a  more  and  more  fruitful  actuality,  the  mys- 
tery of  life,  dim,  inscrutable,  hidden  away, 
seemed  continually  surging  to  the  surface, 
questioning,  warning,  perplexing,  troubling, 
like  a  soul  seeking  a  body  and  always  baffled. 
But  for  us,  who  can  be  students  only  of  the 
fait  accompli,  the  working-plan  is  there  and 
must  suffice. 

That  the  cosmic  enthusiasm  did  not  indeed 
altogether  absorb  or  satisfy  him  is  proved  by 
certain  notes  and  miscellaneous  papers  he  pub- 
lished on  the  question  of  God.  He  was 
plainly  not  contented  with  the  impersonality 
of  Cosmic  Law.  He  described  himself  as  an 
agnostic  leaning  toward  theism,  which  may  be 
taken  as  a  precise  way  of  shadowing  forth  his 
need  of  a  devotional  object.  Of  the  definition 
of  deity  he  says:  "What  must  of  necessity 
remain  at  present  blank  and  abstract  in  our 
idea  of  God  may  possibly  again  be  filled  up 
and  rendered  concrete  when  the  human  mind 
is  prepared  for  a  new  synthesis  of  faith  and 
science."  [Notes  on  Theism.'] 


CONCLUSION  225 

To  me  it  seems  that  the  words  agnostic  and 
Whitman  can  hardly  be  uttered  in  the  same 
breath:  for  the  whole  hopeless  tangle  of  cold 
metaphysical  processes  involved  in  words  like 
agnostic  withers  away  before  one  luminous, 
heartfelt  glimpse  into  the  infinite.  (But  this 
again  illustrates  the  dualism  of  Symonds — 
his  incapacity  to  accept  a  soul-stirring  intui- 
tion without  submitting  it  immediately  to 
analysis.  It  illustrates  the  lifelong  struggle 
in  him  of  the  poet  and  the  critic.  A  man  who 
could  write,  near  the  close  of  his  life,  "If  there 
is  a  God,  we  shall  not  cry  in  vain.  If  there  is 
none,  the  struggle  of  life  shall  not  last 
through  all  eternity.  Self,  agonized  and  tor- 
tured as  it  is,  must  now  repose  on  this  alterna- 
tive"— a  man  who  could  write  this  could  not 
have  possessed  essentially  the  spirit  of  the  cos- 
mic enthusiasm.  He  could  not  have  been  so 
troubled  with  definitions,  he  could  not  have 
wavered  so  in  faith/ 

So  far  as  he  possessed  it  he  found  it  imaged 
in  the  Alps.  His  feeling  for  the  Alps  once 
more  illustrates  the  physical  basis  of  religious 
emotion — it  was  the  longing  of  stifled  lungs 


226  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

for  oxygen,  literally  as  well  as  figuratively. 
So  far  back  as  1858  we  find  him  speaking  of 
grand  scenery  as  an  elevating  influence  which 
depreciates  one's  estimate  of  self.  Visiting 
Switzerland  for  the  first  time  at  twenty-one, 
he  fills  his  mind  with  haunting  pictures  and 
memorable  sounds — the  murmurous  air  of 
waterfalls  and  winds,  wild  flowers  that  call 
to  him  more  and  more  compellingly  through 
days  and  years  of  illness  and  heated  study  in 
England.  "I  love  Switzerland  as  a  second 
home,"  he  writes  already  in  1866,  "hoping  to 
return  to  it,  certain  that  I  am  happier,  purer 
in  mind,  healthier  in  body  there  than  anywhere 
else  in  the  world."  A  year  later  in  London, 
in  the  roaring,  dazzling  summer  streets,  he 
dreams  of  sunrise  over  the  snow-fields,  the 
church  bells  ringing  in  the  valleys,  the  dew 
upon  the  flowers ;  and  without  forgetting  their 
pitiless  indifference  to  man  he  says,  "I  love  the 
mountains  as  I  love  the  majesty  of  justice.  I 
adore  God  through  them,  and  feel  near  to  Him 
among  them."  At  Miirren  in  1863  he  first 
read  Goethe's  Proeviium;  on  the  Pasteuze 
Glacier  seven  years  later  he  translated  it.  In 


CONCLUSION  227 

1869  he  describes  the  Alps  as  his  "only  un- 
exploded  illusion."  Gradually  the  Alpine 
sentiment  becomes  central  in  him.  He  con- 
nects it  with  all  his  major  impressions — with 
Prometheus  on  Caucasus,  with  Beethoven  and 
Handel,  Cleanthes  and  Plato,  Bruno  and 
Whitman,  Michael  Angelo  and  Goethe — just 
those  men,  observe,  who  became  the  subjects 
of  his  criticism.  In  1867  he  writes:  "The  only 
thing  I  know  which  will  restore  my  physical 
tone  and  give  me  health  is  living  in  the  Alps. 
The  only  prospect  of  obtaining  spiritual  tone 
and  health  seems  to  be  the  discovery  of  some 
immaterial  altitudes,  some  mountains  and  tem- 
ples of  God.  As  I  am  prostrated  and  rendered 
vacant  by  scepticism,  the  Alps  are  my  religion. 
I  can  rest  there  and  feel,  if  not  God,  at  least 
greatness — greatness  prior,  and  posterior  to 
man  in  time,  beyond  his  thoughts,  not  of  his 
creation,  independent,  palpable,  immovable, 
proved." 

(  Here,  then,  is  indicated  the  relation  between 
his  physical  condition,  his  religious  attitude, 
and  his  controlling  motive  in  criticism./  The 
Alps  which  could  give  him  health  could  give 


228  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

him  also,  and  for  the  same  reason,  faith.  And 
they  gave  him  that  sense  of  "greatness,"  the 
importance  of  which  in  his  own  work  is 
indicated  hy  a  passage  in  one  of  his  Greek 
studies:  "No  one  should  delude  us  into  think- 
ing that  true  culture  does  not  come  from  the 
impassioned  study  of  everything,  however 
eccentric  and  at  variance  with  our  own  mode 
of  life,  that  is  truly  great.'*  There  we  have 
the  logical  basis  for  his  literary,  as  well  as  his 
religious,  enthusiasm  for  Whitman.  In  the 
Alps  he  not  only  found,  as  Obermann  had 
found,  an  outlet  for  his  mystical  pantheism, 
but  he  found,  what  Tyndall  admitted  as  a  pos- 
sibility, the  laboratory  for  placing  some  such 
pantheism  on  a  scientific  basis.  He  found 
moreover  practical  democracy  among  the 
peasants,  he  found  his  ideal  of  the  human 
body,  which  drew  him  to  Michael  Angelo;  and 
he  came  to  feel  that  "elevating  influence  which 
depreciates  one's  estimate  of  self"  —which 
troubled  him  at  eighteen — as  a  blissful  relief. 
Years  of  introspection  had  given  him  too  much 
of  himself,  and  he  was  glad  enough  to  be 
"sweetly  shipwrecked  on  that  sea." 


CONCLUSION  229 

(it  is  not  surprising,  then,  that  Symonds 
came  to  look  in  literature  for  everything  that 
has  tonic  value.  Health,  moral  and  intellec- 
tual, and  all  that  nourishes  a  high  normality 
in  man,  was  the  ohject  of  his  quest  in  art,  his- 
tory and  literature :  not  sensations  that  console 
the  pessimist,  nor  distinction  that  implies  a 
dead  level  to  throw  it  into  relief,  nor  the 
restoration  of  past  ages  lovelier  than  ours  in 
specific  points  at  the  cost  of  true  democracy. 
His  vision  was  wide  and  sane :  power  and  clair- 
voyance might  have  made  it  prophetic.  For 
the  underlying  principle  of  his  critical  the- 
ory— that  life  is  deeper  than  thought — is  only 
in  our  day,  after  centuries  of  philosophical 
delusion,  becoming  recognized  once  more.  It 
was  a  principle  far  more  "modern"  than  that 
of  a  greater  than  Symonds,  Matthew  Arnold. 
Prose  of  the  centre  was  Arnold's  criterion, 
meaning  prose  of  the  social  centre.  But  the 
criterion  of  Symonds,  held  with  however  much 
defect  of  power,  was  a  more  fundamental  cen- 
tre than  that  of  taste :  one  in  which  even  taste, 
even  the  social  centre,  becomes  provincial  and 
which  admits  Rabelais,  Burns,  Thoreau,  Whit- 


230  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

man  and  a  hundred  others  who  have  no  other 
centre  at  all  than  native  humanity.  "Life  is 
deeper  than  thought" — a  contemporary  plati- 
tude which  with  Symonds  was  notable  for  two 
reasons.  In  the  first  place  it  was  with  him 
a  true  discovery  of  experience,  and  that  al- 
ways elevates  a  platitude.  Secondly,  it  stands 
almost  unique  in  an  age  of  culture  and  in  a 
man  who  contributed  so  much  to  culture  in 
its  popular  aspects.  "I  am  nothing  if  not 
cultivated,"  wrote  Symonds  once,  "or,  at  least, 
the  world  only  expects  culture  from  me.  But 
in  my  heart  of  hearts  I  do  not  believe  in  cul- 
ture, except  as  an  adjunct  to  life.  .  .  .  Pas- 
sion, nerve  and  sinew,  eating  and  drinking, 
even  money-getting — come,  in  my  reckoning, 
before  culture."  In  his  day  perhaps  only  a 
man  deprived  of  life  and  submerged  in  litera- 
ture could  have  proclaimed  that.  Robust 
minds  like  Arnold  or  Browning  could  not  feel 
so  keenly  the  tonic  element  in  thought.  Life 
in  its  own  abundance  was  tonic  enough.  To 
them  it  was  a  commonplace  from  the  outset 
that  life  is  deeper  than  thought — they  could 
not  feel  it  as  a  revelation.  It  was  from  ex- 


CONCLUSION  231 

cess  of  vitality  that  they  were  able,  without 
losing  their  personal  equilibrium,  to  emphasize 
the  purely  intellectual.  In  everything  written 
by  these  men  health  and  strength  were  im- 
plicit, and  for  this  reason  they  were  seldom 
explicit.  Browning  could  afford  to  occupy 
himself  with  intricate  psychological  cases,  and 
Arnold  with  writers  of  exquisite  prose;  but 
Symonds  required  vital  forces  like  Michael 
Angelo  and  Whitman. 

Symonds  again  was  one  of  the  first  of  Eng- 
lish men  of  letters  to  grasp  what  may  be  called 
the  optimism  of  science.  To  Tennyson,  Rus- 
kin,  Carlyle,  Arnold,  Clough,  science  ap- 
peared in  one  way  or  another  as  an  enemy,  a 
negative  agent,  a  cause  of  melancholy,  pessi- 
mism, or  resignation,  subverting  God,  revela- 
tion, personal  immortality.  To  them  it 
brought  with  it  an  overwhelming  sense  of  loss. 
Arnold  and  Clough  consoled  themselves  with 
duty  and  work,  Carlyle  and  Ruskin  passion- 
ately recalled  the  past,  Tennyson  credulously 
snatched  at  the  hope  that  it  might  after  all 
be  theology  in  another  form,  Browning  pro- 
claimed a  totally  unreasonable  optimism.  The 


232  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

positive  aspects  of  science  meanwhile  remained 
hidden,  unpopularized,  uncompromisingly 
"scientific."  Such  an  aspect  as  that  of  euge- 
nics, for  example,  has  only  in  the  last  few 
years,  and  chiefly  through  Continental  influ- 
e.nces,  begun  to  take  its  place  in  our  literature. 
\J5cience,  not  as  a  destroyer,  but  as  a  builder, 
Symonds  divined,  and  his  training  enabled  him 
to  link  that  modern  view  with  the  thought  of 
the  past,  i  He  would  have  gladly  recognized 
the  truth  that  doubt  and  faith  are  attitudes 
toward  life  itself,  not  toward  figments  of  the 
brain,  that  states  of  mind  like  scepticism  and 
pessimism  are  to  be  explained  rather  by  ex- 
periments in  circulation  and  digestion  than 
by  abstract  metaphysical  questions  of  immor- 
tality and  God.  And  he  would  have  recog- 
nized that  this,  instead  of  debasing  our  view 
of  the  human  soul,  glorifies  our  view  of  the 
human  body. 

These,  I  say,  are  aspects  of  science  that 
Symonds  divined,  largely  because  the  prob- 
lem of  his  own  life  and  consequently  the  na- 
ture of  his  experience  was,  unlike  that  of  his 
greater  contemporaries,  more  physical  than  in- 


CONCLUSION  233 

tellectual.  There  was  only  a  defect  of  power 
in  the  man  to  make  it  memorable,  in  the  sense 
in  which  the  teachings  of  Carlyle,  or  Ruskin, 
or  Arnold  are  memorable. 

A  defect  of  power;  and  also  a  defect  of 
coherence.  The  writings  of  Symonds  do  not 
stand  together  as  do  those  of  Arnold  or  Rus- 
kin. There  has  never  been  a  collected  edition 
of  his  works,  and  the  idea  of  such  a  thing  is 
inconceivable.  With  all  their  community  of 
tone  and  subject,  their  marked  evolution  of 
style,  their  consistently  delivered  message,  they 
lack  that  highest  unifying  bond  of  personal- 
ity. Some  of  them  are  isolated  popular  hand- 
books, others  are  esoteric  and  for  the  few, 
others  again  are  merely  mediocre  and  have 
been  forgotten.  Individually  they  appeal  to 
many  different  types  of  mind.  Taken  to- 
gether they  do  not  supply  any  composite 
human  demand,  nor  are  they  powerful  enough 
to  create  any  such  demand.  They  are  indeed 
rather  the  product  of  energy  than  of  power. 

The  conclusions  of  Symonds  reduce  them- 
selves, upon  analysis,  to  sanity  and  common- 
sense:  and  it  appears  certain  that  nothing  is 


234  JOHN  ADDINGTON  SYMONDS 

more  perilous  to  long  life  in  literature  than 
sanity  and  common  sense  when  they  are  not 
founded  upon  clairvoyance.  Only  the  su- 
preme geniuses — Goethe  and  Tolstoy — have 
been  able  to  carry  off  the  palm  with  platitude. 
That  is  because  they  not  only  see  and  experi- 
ence the  truth  in  platitude,  but  feel  it,  with 
a  dynamic  and  world-shaking  passion.  Sy- 
monds,  in  specific  traits  the  equal  of  Arnold, 
or  Ruskin,  or  Carlyle,  falls  short  of  their 
finality  partly  at  least  because  more  than  any 
of  them  he  saw  life  steadily  and  saw  it  whole. 
He  saw  life  neither  through  the  spectacles  of 
the  Zeit-geist  nor  of  the  Hero.  To  him  Eng- 
land was  not  accurately  divided  into  Barbari- 
ans, Philistines,  and  Populace,  nor  was  the 
world  wholly  a  world  of  Plausibilities.  And 
he  was  obviously  more  sensible  in  his  hard- 
won  faith  in  human  evolution  than  that  nobler 
prophet  who  strove  so  tragically  to  restore  the 
Middle  Ages.  But  common  sense  unhappily 
is  the  virtue  of  equilibrium:  and  equilibrium 
is  a  state  of  the  mind  which  has  no  counterpart 
in  life  or  in  men  who,  in  the  profound  sense, 
in  the  normal  sense,  grasp  life— that  is  to  say, 
the  prophets. 


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